FASHION QUOTES V
quotations about fashion
I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting ... but whatever it's worth I did it.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
"Some fashion wisdom from Yves Saint Laurent", USA Today, June 1, 2008
Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds
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 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
There are certain things that even fashion cannot justify.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
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
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
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
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
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 is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency.
HENRY THEODORE TUCKERMAN
The Optimist
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
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
Most fashionable ladies are as diamonds because they are more costly than useful.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
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
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
OSCAR WILDE
The Happy Prince
[Fashion is] a kind of vitamin for style.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz
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