quotations about fashion
[Fashion is] a kind of vitamin for style.
YVES SAINT LAURENT
Ritz
Fashion is a sieve, and money spent on it as dust.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
One of the most perplexing aspects of fashion is its preoccupation with change, and hence with time. Its mutability is the point. Even those who take (or claim to take) no particular interest in clothes will, by accident or passivity, nonetheless go with the fashion flow. A man who wore a doublet and hose in the sixteenth century will not be wearing such an outfit in any of the following centuries unless he's on his way to a costume party. You would either have to take great care of what you already own so you rarely needed to buy new things or go looking for passé ones to be completely out of fashion, which takes more work than being in fashion.
LINDA GRANT
The Thoughtful Dresser
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
In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
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
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
The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Magazine, 1991
Seest thou not what a deformed thief this fashion is?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
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
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
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
A person who is anxious to be a leader of the fashion, or one of the first to follow it, will certainly appear in the eyes of judicious men to have nothing better than a frequent change of dress to recommend him to notice.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to George Steptoe Washington, Mar. 23, 1789