FASHION QUOTES III
quotations about fashion
Fashion is a tyrant from which nothing frees us. We must suit ourselves to its fantastic tastes. But, being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow, nor the last to keep them.
ETIENNE PAVILLON
attributed, Other Men's Minds
If we could understand the full significance of a woman's hat we could prophesy her clothes for the next year, the interior decoration of the next two years, the architecture of the next ten years, and we would have a fairly accurate notion of the pressures, political, economic and religious that go to make the shape of an age.
JAMES LAVER
"Fashion: A Detective Story", Vogue Magazine, January 1, Vogue Magazine, January 1, 1959
Fashion is always silly, for, before it can spread far, it must be calculated for silly people; as examples of sense, wit, or ingenuity could be imitated only by a few.
HORACE WALPOLE
letter to Sir Horace Mann, Sep. 8, 1782
All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
LIN YUTANG
The Chinese Mercury, 1937
Fashion is a mysterious chimera. Elegance, beauty and expense are no longer reliable guides to what is "cool". Outfits applauded on the runway often never make it to the stores.... Just as we get used to one "look", its counterpart comes into vogue. Why do we need or wish to consistently redefine and adorn ourselves? Who makes the rules and who breaks them? Fashion seems responsible for the mayhem, but it is also the creative source of an exciting and enormously profitable industry.
SUE JENKYN JONES
Fashion Design
Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Fashion ... is most capricious in her favours, often running from those that pursue her, and coming round to those that stand still. It were mad to follow her, and rash to oppose her, but neither rash nor mad to despise her.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
A good model can advance fashion by ten years.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85
The apparel oft proclaims the man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
One had as good be out of the world, as out of fashion.
COLLEY CIBBER
Love's Last Shift
Fashion never happens at any fixed point in time or space--that is, individuals and groups are never fully fashionable but are always in the process of becoming fashionable or descending into unfashionability, and, in all probability, doing both at the same time.
MICHAEL CARTER
Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes
Fashion is a striving to overcome the spatial divide between classes, to overcome the invidious comparisons between "them and us", to catch up and overtake the "in crowd". In other words, what it would like to do is to abolish the very incline that enables the fashion dynamic to exist.
MICHAEL CARTER
Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes
Fashion is an inherent part of human social interaction and not the creation of an elite group of designers, producers, or marketers. Because of its basis in individual social comparison, fashion cannot be controlled without undermining its ultimate purpose, which is the expression of individual identity. If self-identity were never in doubt and social comparison never took place, there would be no demand for fashion, and there would be no need or opportunity for style change.
AUBREY CANNON
The Cultural and Historical Contexts of Fashion
Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.
BOOTH TARKINGTON
The Magnificent Ambersons
The fashion industry is not interested in making women feel better about themselves. Fashion is about making people want something they are unlikely to get ... and any satisfaction achieved is fleeting and faintly disappointing.
HADLEY FREEMAN
Guardian, Sep. 9, 2009
We smile at the women who are eagerly following the fashions in dress whilst we are as eagerly following the fashions in thought.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If we could only see, as those removed from our own sphere would see, the criminal folly of sacrificing beautiful and valuable lives to the fashion, which imposes naked necks as a rule of evening costume! Many a sweet young creature who would have lived into happy old age as a beloved wife and honored mother, has gone to an untimely grave because of that ball or that party at which she caught cold from exposure. But fashion so willed it; and neither mother nor daughter had strength to resist her impalpable but absolute decrees.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
There is not so variable a thing in Nature as a lady's head-dress.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, Jun. 22, The Spectator, Jun. 22, 1711
The erogenous zone is always shifting, and it is the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever catching it up.
JAMES LAVER
New Society, February 2, 1984
It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85