FASHION QUOTES III

quotations about fashion

Fashion quote

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

Tags: Horace Walpole


Fashion is a tyrant from which nothing frees us. We must suit ourselves to its fantastic tastes. But, being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow, nor the last to keep them.

ETIENNE PAVILLON

attributed, Other Men's Minds


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

Tags: Yuniya Kawamura


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


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


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

Tags: Charles Caleb Colton


A good model can advance fashion by ten years.

YVES SAINT LAURENT

Ritz, no. 85

Tags: Yves Saint Laurent


Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

Tags: Charles Caleb Colton


The apparel oft proclaims the man.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Hamlet

Tags: William Shakespeare


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

Tags: Aubrey Cannon


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

Tags: Austin O'Malley


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


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


One had as good be out of the world, as out of fashion.

COLLEY CIBBER

Love's Last Shift

Tags: Colley Cibber


The fashion industry is not interested in making women feel better about themselves. Fashion is about making people want something they are unlikely to get ... and any satisfaction achieved is fleeting and faintly disappointing.

HADLEY FREEMAN

Guardian, Sep. 9, 2009


Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.

BOOTH TARKINGTON

The Magnificent Ambersons


It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.

YVES SAINT LAURENT

Ritz, no. 85

Tags: Yves Saint Laurent


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

Tags: Michael Carter


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


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

Tags: James Laver