FASHION QUOTES II

quotations about fashion

Fashion quote

The fashion world can truly be a jungle filled with manufacturers who come up from the bottom and are so tough, insecure, jealous and greedy that there is a kind of animal, killer instinct in them. It's a fiercely competitive business.

CALVIN KLEIN

Playboy, May 1984

Tags: Calvin Klein


Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men any more than fine feathers make fine birds.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

letter to Bushrod Washington, Jan. 15, 1783

Tags: George Washington


There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson


Fashion is predicated on the fear that the naked body, divested of signs, is incapable of authority.

CHRISTIAN THORNE

The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment


Choose thy clothes by thine own eyes, not another's.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude

Tags: William Penn


When seen in retrospect, fashions seem to express their era. Although it is more difficult to draw conclusions from contemporary clothes, the same principles which hold for the clothes of the past must hold for clothes of the present and the future.

JAMES LAVER

"Fashion: A Detective Story", Vogue Magazine, January 1, 1959

Tags: James Laver


In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Symbolic Exchange and Death

Tags: Jean Baudrillard


The kinetic, open personality of fashion is the personality which a society in the process of rapid transformation most needs. No longer derided as superficial, frivolous or deceitful, fashion thus has an important role to play, not merely in adorning the body but in fashioning a modern, reflexive self.

CAROLINE EVANS

Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle


A respectable appearance is sufficient to make people more interested in your soul.

KARL LAGERFELD

attributed, Change Your Clothes

Tags: Karl Lagerfeld


If fashion is a paradigm of the capitalist processes which inform modern sensibilities, then it is also a vibrant metaphor for modernity itself.

CHRISTOPHER BREWARD & CAROLINE EVANS

introduction, Fashion and Modernity


Tell me, why do former young designers who are now in their middle 40s have to redo the 1960s and 70s. Why they cannot invent fashion for today?

KARL LAGERFELD

The Guardian, Mar. 25, The Guardian, Mar. 25, 2014


Fashion is a hard mistress.

SARAH STICKNEY ELLIS

The Women of England


I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous.

YVES SAINT LAURENT

"Some fashion wisdom from Yves Saint Laurent", USA Today, June 1, USA Today, June 1, 2008


The nicest women among us--pure, high-minded women, who would die rather than be guilty of impropriety if it appeared like an impropriety to them, and whose very innocence makes them unsuspicious of evil--get accustomed, as everyone must, more or less, to an objectionable fashion, and follow it in real simplicity of nature as a thing without meaning or effect.

ELIZA LYNN LINTON

"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women


Judge not a man by his clothes, but by his wife's clothes.

THOMAS R. DEWAR

attributed, The Speaker's Book of Quotations


An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery ... proves that the soul has not a strong individual character.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Tags: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley


Fashion ... has brought every thing into vogue, by turns.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

Tags: Charles Caleb Colton


Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

ROLAND BARTHES

Systeme de la Mode


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


If we could understand the full significance of a woman's hat we could prophesy her clothes for the next year, the interior decoration of the next two years, the architecture of the next ten years, and we would have a fairly accurate notion of the pressures, political, economic and religious that go to make the shape of an age.

JAMES LAVER

"Fashion: A Detective Story", Vogue Magazine, January 1, Vogue Magazine, January 1, 1959