quotations about fashion
Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
The Intellectual Life
Fashion is the great governor of this world; it presides, not only in matters of dress and amusement, but in law, physic, politics, religion, and all other things of the gravest kind; indeed, the wisest of men would be puzzled to give any better reason why particular forms in all these have been at certain times universally received, and at others universally rejected, than that they were in or out of fashion.
HENRY FIELDING
"The True Patriot"
You can say what you like about long dresses, but they cover a multitude of shins.
MAE WEST
attributed, Little Giant Encyclopedia: Toasts & Quotes
On the edge of discourse, of 'civilization', of speech itself, experimental fashion can act out what is hidden culturally. And, like a neurotic symptom, it can utter a kind of mute resistance to the socially productive process of constructing an identity.
CAROLINE EVANS
Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity & Deathliness
Fashion is a sapper and miner, and is ever hard at work sapping and undermining the constitutions of its votaries.
PYE HENRY CHAVASSE
Man's Strength and Woman's Beauty
Many-tinted are the eyes of fashion.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
A woman is closest to being naked when she is well-dressed.
COCO CHANEL
attributed, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life
A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn't learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish. For him the truncated process of creating will always be an interrupted act of love, and his style will bear the shame of it, the impoverishment.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85
Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self.
VALERIE STEELE
The Berg Companion to Fashion
The entire spring and summer line from Marc Jacobs was stolen on the way to the fashion show in Paris. The thief is considered armed and fabulous.
JAY LENO
The Tonight Show, Nov. 17, 2011
Fashion is a poor vocation. Its creed, that idleness is a privilege and work a disgrace, is among the deadliest errors. Without depth of thought, or earnestness of feeling, or strength of purpose, living an unreal life, sacrificing substance to show, substituting the fictitious for the natural, mistaking a crowd for society, finding its chief pleasure in ridicule, and exhausting its ingenuity in expedients for killing time, fashion is among the last influences under which a human being, who respects himself, or who comprehends the great end of life, would desire to be placed.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
Fashion is one of the great living arts of civilisation and self-decoration one of the fundamental human urges.
JANEY IRONSIDE
A Fashion Alphabet
Fashion is a process in two senses: it is a market-driven cycle of consumer desire and demand; and it is a modern mechanism for the fabrication of the self. It is in this respect that fashion operates as a fulcrum for negotiating the meeting of internal and external worlds.
CHRISTOPHER BREWARD & CAROLINE EVANS
introduction, Fashion and Modernity
Perhaps I am wrong in saying that not one of us dares dispute this tyrant, this great Dalai Lama of the work-room and the manufactory; for every now and then we do meet with recusants who refuse to take on themselves the yoke of fashion, and who walk in unfettered freedom, bound by no silken ties and lured by no false lights of pretended beauty. But unfortunately they are generally women who fling off the bonds of real beauty as well as the false ones of fashion, and who appear as frightful in their own originality as they would have been under the most servile imitation; women who, because they will not be slaves to conformity make themselves slaves to ugliness, and find no mean between the two opposite poles of extravagance in obedience or eccentricity in dissent.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
attributed, Little Giant Encyclopedia: Toasts & Quotes
Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.
QUENTIN CRISP
New York Magazine, Nov. 20, 1978
The prettiest fashion, and the wisest, that we have inaugurated for a long while is the short walking costume; which it is to be hoped will become the fashion for rooms as well as for streets. But there is little chance of that--it is too rational, too pretty, and too simple.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. FORSTER
A Room with a View
A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
SOPHIA LOREN
attributed, How to Be a Hepburn in a Hilton World
I don't do fashion, I AM fashion.
COCO CHANEL
attributed, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel