FASHION QUOTES V
quotations about fashion
Fashion is the sorceress to whose spell we all succumb, the tyrant whose will not one of us dares dispute, the ignis fatuus whose wavering flame we follow, indifferent to the nature of the ground through which we are led. Bog or brake--what does it matter? so long as we go precisely as we are told, and obey that mysterious and capricious leader of ours, we are all right; and if we do fall into odd places meanwhile, that is not our own fault but rather the misfortune of the times.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
Girls do not set the fashions. They may and do exaggerate them, because there is very little else to distinguish one girl from another in the crowd, and because they are silly; but it is the woman who is just beginning to be on the wane, la femme presque passée, who wants to look still youthful and girlish, from whom proceed nine-tenths of the devices to conceal the figure and delude the eye.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
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! -- a word which knaves and fools may use,
Their knavery and folly to excuse.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Rosciad
We are but a day in this world, and in that day the fashion is changed a thousand times: all seek liberty, yet all deprive themselves of it.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
The Divine Comedy
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
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
There are certain things that even fashion cannot justify.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Fashion is all about who you are. It's about expressing your individuality and showing the world your personality. Fashion is not about looking like everyone else. So stand out!
LAURIE MCELROY
The New V.P.
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
Most fashionable ladies are as diamonds because they are more costly than useful.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
No fashion is ever a success unless it is used as a form of seduction.
CHRISTIAN DIOR
attributed, Dress Code
[Fashion is] a kind of vitamin for style.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz
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
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
Fashion is a product of a society with more than one class in it and where upward movement between classes is both possible and desirable. Thus it would seem that, as soon as this kind of society exists, as soon as modern, capitalist society exists, fashion exists.
MALCOLM BARNARD
Fashion as Communication
Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency.
HENRY THEODORE TUCKERMAN
The Optimist
One of the most perplexing aspects of fashion is its preoccupation with change, and hence with time. Its mutability is the point. Even those who take (or claim to take) no particular interest in clothes will, by accident or passivity, nonetheless go with the fashion flow. A man who wore a doublet and hose in the sixteenth century will not be wearing such an outfit in any of the following centuries unless he's on his way to a costume party. You would either have to take great care of what you already own so you rarely needed to buy new things or go looking for passé ones to be completely out of fashion, which takes more work than being in fashion.
LINDA GRANT
The Thoughtful Dresser
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
QUENTIN CRISP
Wisdom for the Soul