FASHION QUOTES V
quotations about fashion
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
Fashion! -- a word which knaves and fools may use,
Their knavery and folly to excuse.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Rosciad
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
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
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
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
No fashion is ever a success unless it is used as a form of seduction.
CHRISTIAN DIOR
attributed, Dress Code
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
Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds
Most fashionable ladies are as diamonds because they are more costly than useful.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency.
HENRY THEODORE TUCKERMAN
The Optimist
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
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 the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
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
[Fashion is] a kind of vitamin for style.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz
No more rules, the freedom of dressing. The beauty of mixing vintage clothes with a pair of jeans that I love.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
interview, Dazed & Confused, March 2000
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