FASHION QUOTES IV
quotations about fashion
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 what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
OSCAR WILDE
An Ideal Husband
Fashion as a belief is manifested through clothing.
YUNIYA KAWAMURA
Fashion-ology
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 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"
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 a tyrant from which nothing frees us. We must suit ourselves to its fantastic tastes. But, being compelled to live under its foolish laws, the wise man is never the first to follow, nor the last to keep them.
ETIENNE PAVILLON
attributed, Other Men's Minds
If we could only see, as those removed from our own sphere would see, the criminal folly of sacrificing beautiful and valuable lives to the fashion, which imposes naked necks as a rule of evening costume! Many a sweet young creature who would have lived into happy old age as a beloved wife and honored mother, has gone to an untimely grave because of that ball or that party at which she caught cold from exposure. But fashion so willed it; and neither mother nor daughter had strength to resist her impalpable but absolute decrees.
ELIZA LYNN LINTON
"The Follies of Fashion", Ourselves, Essays on Women
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
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
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
It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz, no. 85
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
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Life of Reason
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 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! -- a word which knaves and fools may use,
Their knavery and folly to excuse.
CHARLES CHURCHILL
The Rosciad
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
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
Change of fashions is the tax which industry imposes on the vanity of the rich.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
attributed, Many Thoughts of Many Minds