FASHION QUOTES II
quotations about fashion
The fashion world can truly be a jungle filled with manufacturers who come up from the bottom and are so tough, insecure, jealous and greedy that there is a kind of animal, killer instinct in them. It's a fiercely competitive business.
CALVIN KLEIN
Playboy, May 1984
Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men any more than fine feathers make fine birds.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Bushrod Washington, Jan. 15, 1783
There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson
A respectable appearance is sufficient to make people more interested in your soul.
KARL LAGERFELD
attributed, Change Your Clothes
Fashion is predicated on the fear that the naked body, divested of signs, is incapable of authority.
CHRISTIAN THORNE
The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment
The nicest women among us--pure, high-minded women, who would die rather than be guilty of impropriety if it appeared like an impropriety to them, and whose very innocence makes them unsuspicious of evil--get accustomed, as everyone must, more or less, to an objectionable fashion, and follow it in real simplicity of nature as a thing without meaning or effect.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
If fashion is a paradigm of the capitalist processes which inform modern sensibilities, then it is also a vibrant metaphor for modernity itself.
CHRISTOPHER BREWARD & CAROLINE EVANS
introduction, Fashion and Modernity
In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Symbolic Exchange and Death
I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
"Some fashion wisdom from Yves Saint Laurent", USA Today, June 1, USA Today, June 1, 2008
When seen in retrospect, fashions seem to express their era. Although it is more difficult to draw conclusions from contemporary clothes, the same principles which hold for the clothes of the past must hold for clothes of the present and the future.
JAMES LAVER
"Fashion: A Detective Story", Vogue Magazine, January 1, 1959
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
ROLAND BARTHES
Systeme de la Mode
Choose thy clothes by thine own eyes, not another's.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Tell me, why do former young designers who are now in their middle 40s have to redo the 1960s and 70s. Why they cannot invent fashion for today?
KARL LAGERFELD
The Guardian, Mar. 25, The Guardian, Mar. 25, 2014
Judge not a man by his clothes, but by his wife's clothes.
THOMAS R. DEWAR
attributed, The Speaker's Book of Quotations
Fashion is a hard mistress.
SARAH STICKNEY ELLIS
The Women of England
The kinetic, open personality of fashion is the personality which a society in the process of rapid transformation most needs. No longer derided as superficial, frivolous or deceitful, fashion thus has an important role to play, not merely in adorning the body but in fashioning a modern, reflexive self.
CAROLINE EVANS
Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle
He alone is a man, who can resist the genius of the age, the tone of fashion, with vigorous simplicity and modest courage.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
Fashion ... has brought every thing into vogue, by turns.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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