FASHION QUOTES IV
quotations about fashion
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 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
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
OSCAR WILDE
An Ideal Husband
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
Singularity in dress argues eccentricity of character. A queer cut of the coat represents a crotchet in the brain.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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"
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
Fashion as a belief is manifested through clothing.
YUNIYA KAWAMURA
Fashion-ology
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
Fashion is an international language.
SUE JENKYN JONES
Fashion Design
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 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
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
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
Fashion! -- a word which knaves and fools may use,
Their knavery and folly to excuse.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Rosciad
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
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
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
Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds