FASHION QUOTES IV
quotations about fashion
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
OSCAR WILDE
An Ideal Husband
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 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
Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Catalog of the Exhibition Held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983
The irrational aspect of fashion is very important; fashion provides a field for the expression of fetishistic and magical impulses and beliefs.
ELIZABETH WILSON
"Fashion and Modernity"
Feminist readings of fashion have often portrayed it as a kind of conspiracy to distract women from the real affairs of society, namely economics and politics. Fashion has been seen as a device for confining women to an inferior social order, largely because it demands an unequal expenditure of time and money by women on activities which do not attract the professional attention and efforts of men. Fashion works to intensify self-absorption and thereby reduces the social, cultural and intellectual horizons of women.
JOANNE FINKELSTEIN
After a Fashion
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 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
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
It should never be forgotten that any one who makes himself a slave to fashion is just as pusillanimous as one who makes himself a slave to any other master.
JACOB WILSON
Self-Control
If we were all wise we should do well; but are we not too silly yet to be left free to follow each her own desires? The very foolishness of our fashions, I am afraid proves this; and the almost as striking foolishness of our dissent shows how little we can combine revolt with prudence, and how our opposition to black is not necessarily white.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.
YVES SAINT-LAURENT
New Woman
Fashion is not a real element of beauty in external objects; and to persons who possess a good endowment of Form, Constructiveness and Ideality, intrinsic elegance is much more pleasing and permanently agreeable, than forms of less merit, recommended merely by being new. Hence there is a beauty which never palls, and there are objects over which fashion exercises no control.
GEORGE COMBE
A System of Phrenology
It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85
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
Fashion! -- a word which knaves and fools may use,
Their knavery and folly to excuse.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Rosciad
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
Fashion is all about who you are. It's about expressing your individuality and showing the world your personality. Fashion is not about looking like everyone else. So stand out!
LAURIE MCELROY
The New V.P.
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
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