All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867, French poet)
Fashion is not something that exists only in dresses. Fashion is in the sky, in the street; fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.
Coco Chanel (1883-1971, French couturier)
Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value. If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.
Stephen Bayley (1951-, British design critic)
The same costume will be Indecent 10 years before its time, Shameless 5 years before its time, Outre (daring) 1 year before its time, Smart, Dowdy 1 year after its time, Hideous 10 years after its time, Ridiculous 20 years after its time, Amusing 30 years after its time, Quaint 50 years after its time, Charming 70 years after its time, Romantic 100 years after its time, Beautiful 150 years after its time.
James Laver
Everyday is like a fashion show and the whole world is the runway. Elegance is when the inside is as beautiful as the outside.
Coco Chanel (1883-1971, French couturier)
The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.
David Mamet (1947-, American playwright)
If one considers how much reason every person has for anxiety and timid self-concealment, and how three-quarters of his energy and goodwill can be paralyzed and made unfruitful by it, one has to be very grateful to fashion, insofar as it sets that three-quarters free and communicates self-confidence and mutual cheerful agreeableness to those who know they are subject to its law.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher)
I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973, Spanish artist)
Fashion is born by small facts, trends, or even politics, never by trying to make little pleats and furbelows, by trinkets, by clothes easy to copy, or by the shortening or lengthening of a skirt.
Elsa Schiaparelli (1896-1973, Italian fashion designer)
The customer is the final filter. What survives the whole process is what people wear. I’m not interested in making clothes that end up in some dusty museum.
Marc Jacobs
I wanted to give a woman comfortable clothes that would flow with her body. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well-dressed.
Coco Chanel
We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
The great attraction of fashion is that it diverted attention from the insoluble problems of beauty and provided an easy way – which money could buy… to a simply stated, easily reproduced ideal of beauty, however temporary that ideal.
Theodore Zeldin
Fashion is what you’re offered four times a year by designers. And style is what you choose.
Lauren Hutton
I love women. I’m trying to do beautiful things with them. I’m not trying to insult them. My life is not about that.
Calvin Klein
In a machine age, dressmaking is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable.
Christian Dior
Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde
Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.
Bruce Lee
I love new clothes. If everyone could just wear new clothes everyday, I reckon depression wouldn’t exist anymore.
Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic
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