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How to dress? When the money is going from you wear anything you like. When the money is coming to you, dress your best.
-Proverb
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Fashion is a tyrant from which there is no deliverance; all must conform to its whimsical.
-Proverb
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Always something new, seldom something good.
-Proverb
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Fashion is more powerful than any tyrant.
-Proverb
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There is not so variable a thing in nature as a lady's head-dress.
-Joseph Addison
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She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.
-Louisa May Alcott
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Her hat is a creation that will never go out of style; it will just look ridiculous year after year.
-Fred A. Allen
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A man should look as if he has bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care and then forgotten all about them.
-Hardy Amies
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The best-dressed woman is one whose clothes wouldn't look too strange in the country.
-Sir Hardy Amies
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The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
-Hannah Arendt
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You look rather rash my dear your colors don't quite match your face.
-Daisy Ashford
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I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked.
-David Bailey
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Fashions are born and they die too quickly for anyone to learn to love them.
-Bettina Ballard
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The New is not a fashion, it is a value.
-Roland Barthes
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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
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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
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It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating. If a woman wears a high-heeled shoe it changes the apparent musculature of the leg so that you get an effect of twanging sinew, of tension needing to be released. Her bottom sticks out like an offering. At the same time, the lofty perch is an expression of vulnerability, she is effectively hobbled and unable to escape. There is something arousing about this declaration that she is prepared to sacrifice function for form.
-Stephen Bayley
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Fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsqequently turns its back on bad and good alike.
-Eric Bently, "Introduction to Naked Masks by Luigi Pirandello", 1952
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When in doubt, wear red.
-Bill Blass
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Nineties style isn't.
-David Borenstein, December 19, 1999
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From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first.
-Bertolt Brecht
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Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.
-Robert Bresson
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An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.
-Robert Bresson
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If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed.
-Beau Brummel
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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.
-Anthony Burgess, You've Had Your Time, 1990
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Society is founded upon cloth.
-Thomas Carlyle
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If the cut of the costume indicates intellect and talent, then the color indicates temper and heart.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
-Angela Carter
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Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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Nothing goes out of fashion sooner than a long dress with a very low neck.
-Coco Chanel
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Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
-Coco Chanel
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Dress shabbily, they notice the dress. Dress impeccably, they notice the woman.
-Coco Chanel
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Fashion is made to become unfashionable.
-Coco Chanel
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Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
-Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.
-Lord Chesterfield
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The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.
-Lord Chesterfield
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When a person is in fashion, all they do is right.
-Lord Chesterfield
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If you are not in fashion, you are nobody.
-Lord Chesterfield, "Letter to his son", April 30, 1750
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I was the first f****** hippy to enter this business, you know... I was one of the first girls to say I don't give a f*** about this whole supermodel thing.
-Helena Christensen
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There is no such thing as a moral dress. It's people who are moral or immoral.
-Jennie Jerome Churchill
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You know, one had as good be out of the world, as out of the fashion.
-Colley Cibber
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I don't set trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them.
-Dick Clark
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You couldn't tell if she was dressed for an opera or an operation.
-Irvin S. Cobb
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Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
-Jean Cocteau, "New York World-Telegram & Sun", August 21, 1960
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Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like some plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal. No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl.
-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
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My weakness is wearing too much leopard print.
-Jackie Collins
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Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.
-Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, 1825
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I'd like to put on buckskins and a ponytail and go underwater with a reed, hiding from the Indians... To me, that's sexy!
-Kevin Costner
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Judge not a man by his clothes, but by his wife's clothes.
-Lord Thomas Dewar
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What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?
-Princess of Wales Diana
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Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.
-Charles Dickens
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I dress for women and I undress for men.
-Angie Dickenson
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Nor is the people's judgement always true;
The most may err as grossly as the few.
-John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, Pt I. 781
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Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.
-Andrea Dworkin
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Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it.
-Albert Einstein
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We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value -- a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?
-Linda Ellerbee
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I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Know first who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.
-Euripides
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Fashion is the science of appearance, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
-Henry Fielding
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Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.
-Shelby Foote
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Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.
-Anatole France
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Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.
-Benjamin Franklin
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Good clothes open all doors.
-Thomas Fuller
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A modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.
-Oliver Goldsmith
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Even knowledge has to be in the fashion, and where it is not, it is wise to affect ignorance.
-Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldy Wisdom, 1647
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They look quite promising in the shop; and not entirely without hope when I get them back into my wardrobe. But then, when I put them on they tend to deteriorate with a very strange rapidity and one feels so sorry for them.
-Joyce Grenfell
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The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Aren't I the best?
-Katharine Hamnett
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You don't learn style from watching people on a runway. Fashion happens every morning when you wake up.
-Shalom Harlow
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Clothes make the poor invisible. America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.
-Michael Harrington
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Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
-Mary Hays
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Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
-William Hazlitt
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Fashon is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath -- tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
-William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays, 1839
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Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken.
-William Hazlitt, The Conversations of James Northcote
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I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions
-Lillian Hellman, Letter to House Un-American Activities Committee, May 19, 1952
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Nobody creates a fad. It just happens. People love going along with the idea of a beautiful pig. It's like a conspiracy.
-Jim Henson
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The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind -- the mind of a fighter -- in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning.
-Eric Hoffer
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To the old, the new is usually bad news.
-Eric Hoffer
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The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.
-Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of the Mind, 1954
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Because modeling is lucrative, I'm able to save up and be more particular about the acting roles I take.
-Kathy Ireland
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Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.
-Samuel Johnson
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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
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Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.
-Hedy Lamarr
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The beggar wears all colors fearing none.
-Charles Lamb
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People ask how can a Jewish kid from the Bronx do preppy clothes? Does it have to do with class and money? It has to do with dreams.
-Ralph Lauren
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The same costume will be Indecent 10 years before its time, Shameless 5 years before its time, Outr? (daring) 1 year before its time, Smart, Dowdy 1 year after its time, Hideous 20 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
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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Fashion for the most part is nothing but the ostentation of riches.
-John Locke
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Where women are concerned, the rule is never to go out with anyone better dressed than you.
-John Malkovich
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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
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Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.
-Paul De Man
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Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.
-Queen Maria
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It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man is so much to be desired. The leg is the best part of the figure and the best leg is the man s. Man should no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms, in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid.
-Alice Meynell
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Glamour, that trans-human aura or power to attract imitation, is a kind of vessel into which dreams are poured, and some vessels are simply worthier than others... A beautiful woman can turn heads but real glamour has a deeper pull... Glamour is the power to rearrange people's emotions, which, in effect, is the power to control one's environment.
-Arthur Miller
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The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
-Henry Miller
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A little of everything and nothing thoroughly, after the French fashion.
-Michel de Montaigne, Essays, I. 26
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High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
-Christopher Morley
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So dress and conduct yourself so that people who have been in your company will not recall what you had on.
-John Newton
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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
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Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
-Dorothy Parker
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Where's the man could ease a heart, like a satin gown?
-Dorothy Parker
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An accent mark, perhaps, instead of a whole western accent -- a point of punctuation rather than a uniform twang. That is how it should be worn: as a quiet point of character reference, an apt phrase of sartorial allusion -- macho, sotto voce.
-Phil Patton
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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
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In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking but now, God knows, anything goes.
-Cole Porter
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I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
-Gilda Radner
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No man is esteemed for colorful garments except by fools and women.
-Sir Walter Raleigh
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Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it.
-Fran
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Every time a woman leaves off something she looks better, but every time a man leaves off something he looks worse.
-Will Rogers
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I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity -- all I hope for in my clothes.
-Yves Saint-Laurent
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It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.
-Yves Saint-Laurent
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A good model can advance fashion by ten years.
-Yves Saint-Laurent
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
-George Santayana
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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
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The difference between the girls today and models of the past is that we are not only interested in fashion: we are going in so many different directions at once. We work harder -- at night and on weekends. On the modeling profession
-Claudia Schiffer
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No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.
-Friedrich von Schiller
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The apparel oft proclaims the man.
-William Shakespeare
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Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy; rich not gaudy; for the apparel oft proclaims the man.
-William Shakespeare
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The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
-William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, 1598
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Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
-George Bernard Shaw
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The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
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It's not that I don't want to be a beauty, that I don't yearn to be dripping with glamour. It's just that I can't see how any woman can find time to do to herself all the things that must apparently be done to make herself beautiful and, having once done them, how anyone without the strength of mind of a foreign missionary can keep up such a regime.
-Cornelia Otis Skinner
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He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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You must be in fashion is the utterance of weak headed mortals.
-C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon
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For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.
-Gloria Steinem
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Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
-Henri B. Stendhal
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She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitch folk.
-Jonathan Swift
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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
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He never chooses an opinion, he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
-Leo Tolstoy
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There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.
-Lily Tomlin
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They are best dressed, whose dress no one observes.
-Anthony Trollope
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I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.
-Anthony Trollope
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Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
-Mark Twain
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We act the way we dress. Neglected and untidy clothes reflect a neglected and untidy mind.
-Source Unknown
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Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
-John Updike
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It is new fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Philosophical Dictionary, 1764
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When a woman dresses up for an occasion, the man should become the black velvet pillow for the jewel.
-John Weitz
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You can say what you like about long dresses, but they cover a multitude of shins.
-Mae West
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One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
-Oscar Wilde
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Woman's first duty in life is to her dressmaker. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.
-Oscar Wilde
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Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
-Oscar Wilde
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Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment the universal.
-Oscar Wilde
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For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.
-Oscar Wilde
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He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say when!
-P. G. [Sir Pelham Grenville] Wodehouse
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There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
-Virginia Woolf
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All women's dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
-Lin Yutang
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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
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Books about Fashion
