FASHION QUOTES III
quotations about fashion
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 is not created by a single individual but by everyone involved in the production of fashion, and thus fashion is a collective activity.
YUNIYA KAWAMURA
Fashion-ology
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
A good model can advance fashion by ten years.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85
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
The apparel oft proclaims the man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
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
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
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
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
Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Fashion is political, especially when you're in a marginalized community. We have been left out of fashion since forever. But now we're getting a foothold. I think it is political for a fat woman to wear a bikini or a crop top or to basically exist in a world that's telling them that they should not exist.
GABI GREGG
interview, Cosmopolitan, December 11, 2017
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
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
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
The air of fashion, which many young people are so eager to attain, always strikes me like the studied attitudes of some modern prints, copied with tasteless servility after the antigue; the soul is left out, and none of the parts are tied together by what may properly be termed character.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
A Vindication of the Rights of 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
One had as good be out of the world, as out of fashion.
COLLEY CIBBER
Love's Last Shift
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
But what can we say of the fashion which dyes the hair, paints the cheeks, blackens the eyelids with antimony to make the orbit look larger and the lashes longer, or that expands the pupils with belladonna, no matter at what cost of complexion or future eyesight? What too can we say of the fashion which uncovers the arms and neck in the evening after having clothed them through the day in flannel, or velvet, or in warm wadded stuffs? Women threatened with bronchitis or rheumatism sit all day long in a warm room muffled up to the throat in thick material; at night they uncover below their shoulders, and go out in the cold winter air with just an opera cloak thrown over their shivering skins. But this is fashion; and none of us dare disobey it; none of us dare go out in the evening with dresses made after the pattern of our morning ones, or wear in the morning low bodices and short sleeves to at least equalize the risk, and inure us to the evening attire without damage. There is no intrinsic reason why we should not all be sitting in low-bodices and short sleeves at this very moment, though we will make it ten o'clock; but if we were, we should be thought mad or bad or both, and not even our staunchest friends would stand by us.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women