FASHION QUOTES V
quotations about fashion
Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency.
HENRY THEODORE TUCKERMAN
The Optimist
You always hear about fashion's success stories. How a starlet lost an earring one night and by the next morning, the entire country was wearing one earring. Or how sweaters made a comeback in a drugstore, or a First Lady influenced how we dressed during her reign. But what about the losers? The fashions that came and went out the same day? The hopes and dreams of designers that were shattered by the sound of fifty million women ... laughing themselves to death.
ERMA BOMBECK
If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries
If we were all wise we should do well; but are we not too silly yet to be left free to follow each her own desires? The very foolishness of our fashions, I am afraid proves this; and the almost as striking foolishness of our dissent shows how little we can combine revolt with prudence, and how our opposition to black is not necessarily white.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
I would argue that fashion is a space where industry articulates issues of identity and signification for the purposes of competitive advantage to such a degree that culture and economy become mutually constitutive to the extent of being analytically inseparable.
ADAM BRIGGS
Fashion and Modernity
Singularity in dress argues eccentricity of character. A queer cut of the coat represents a crotchet in the brain.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Catalog of the Exhibition Held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983
Feminist readings of fashion have often portrayed it as a kind of conspiracy to distract women from the real affairs of society, namely economics and politics. Fashion has been seen as a device for confining women to an inferior social order, largely because it demands an unequal expenditure of time and money by women on activities which do not attract the professional attention and efforts of men. Fashion works to intensify self-absorption and thereby reduces the social, cultural and intellectual horizons of women.
JOANNE FINKELSTEIN
After a Fashion
It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of a man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire.
JANE AUSTEN
Northanger Abbey
Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.
JAMES LAVER
"Fashion: A Detective Story", Vogue Magazine, January 1, Vogue Magazine, January 1, 1959
Fashion is the veriest goddess of semblance and of shade; to be happy is of far less consequence to her worshippers than to appear so.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
In hindsight, my initial love for fashion was about hope and evolving to become the type of woman I wanted to be: strong, confident and feminine. I always loved the idea of dressing up--my wardrobe and how I present myself reflecting how I feel on the inside. That is what I do for other people now. I give women the means to express themselves and be who they are and who they aspire to be, and I think there is a real beauty in this.
RACHEL ROY
Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2007
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
OSCAR WILDE
The Happy Prince
There are certain things that even fashion cannot justify.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Most fashionable ladies are as diamonds because they are more costly than useful.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
QUENTIN CRISP
Wisdom for the Soul
We are living in such a troubled world that fashion seems completely irrelevant. Yet ... it's a very, very mysterious thing. Why all of a sudden do people like yellow? Why all of a sudden do people wear combat boots?
DIANE VON FURSTENBERG
Newsweek, Aug. 7, 2006
Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.
ROLAND BARTHES
Systeme de la Mode
No fashion is ever a success unless it is used as a form of seduction.
CHRISTIAN DIOR
attributed, Dress Code
A young lady can only look charming at so much per yard. A pretty miss in calico is a lovely woman in silk; and a charming girl in muslin is an angel in satin. At least she thinks so, and who would contradict a lady?
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought