quotations about fashion
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
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
While the fashion industry may, at least at the top end, be thriving, the notion of fashion itself is becoming more and more meaningless. Any discipline in fashion has long since evaporated; the idea of a single fashionable skirt length, or heel height, is incomprehensible. The definition of the fashionable has become so skimpy that it refers not to the mode of dress of everyday people--the clothes that have sufficiently caught the popular imagination to be worn in a widespread manner--but only to the styles that momentarily excite members of the fashion caravan.
REBECCA MEAD
"The Last Designer," New York Magazine, Sep. 16, 1996
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
OSCAR WILDE
The Happy Prince
Fashion is a sieve, and money spent on it as dust.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always 20 times better.
MARGARET OLIPHANT
attributed, Women Know Everything
Only the minute and the future are interesting in fashion--it exists to be destroyed. If everybody did everything with respect, you'd go nowhere.
KARL LAGERFELD
Vanity Fair, Feb. 1992
There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Fashion is socially reproductive, training us to be flexible and responsive to change in a fast-changing world.
CAROLINE EVANS
Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle
What is called fashion is the tradition of the moment. All tradition carries with it a certain necessity for people to put themselves on a level with it.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic.
JAMES LAVER
attributed, Business Wit & Wisdom
Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.
ERMA BOMBECK
attributed, Chicken Soup for the Shopper's Soul
Seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
The flowers of fashion have but fickle friends; they are the freak of the moment, much prized today, the more despised tomorrow.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
It is rather a mark of vanity not to dress well. The sloven thinks that nature has done enough for him.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self.
VALERIE STEELE
The Berg Companion to Fashion
I definitely think that fashion is a form of art and love that people can express themselves through what they wear.
PARIS HILTON
OMG, Jul. 7, 2010
Perhaps I am wrong in saying that not one of us dares dispute this tyrant, this great Dalai Lama of the work-room and the manufactory; for every now and then we do meet with recusants who refuse to take on themselves the yoke of fashion, and who walk in unfettered freedom, bound by no silken ties and lured by no false lights of pretended beauty. But unfortunately they are generally women who fling off the bonds of real beauty as well as the false ones of fashion, and who appear as frightful in their own originality as they would have been under the most servile imitation; women who, because they will not be slaves to conformity make themselves slaves to ugliness, and find no mean between the two opposite poles of extravagance in obedience or eccentricity in dissent.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women