Fashion - Quotes

A respectable appearance is sufficient to make people more interested in your soul. - Karl Lagerfeld

An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery ... proves that the soul has not a strong individual character. - Mary Wollstonecraft

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. - George Bernard Shaw

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich. - Nicolas Chamfort

Choose thy clothes by thine own eyes, not another's. - William Penn

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but, when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. - Henry Ward Beecher

Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men any more than fine feathers make fine birds. - George Washington

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. - Henry David Thoreau

Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class. - James Laver

Fashion ... has brought everything into vogue, by turns. - Charles Caleb Colton

Fashion ... is most capricious in her favours, often running from those that pursue her, and coming round to those that stand still. It was mad to follow her, and rash to oppose her, but neither rash nor mad to despise her. - Charles Caleb Colton

Fashion can be bought, style one must possess. - Unknown

Fashion is a mysterious chimera. Elegance, beauty and expense are no longer reliable guides to what is "cool". Outfits applauded on the runway often never make it to the stores.... Just as we get used to one "look", its counterpart comes into vogue. Why do we need or wish to consistently redefine and adorn ourselves? Who makes the rules and who breaks them? Fashion seems responsible for the mayhem, but it is also the creative source of an exciting and enormously profitable industry. - Sue Jenkyn Jones

Fashion is a sieve, and money spent on it as dust. - Edward Counsel

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

Fashion is an inherent part of human social interaction and not the creation of an elite group of designers, producers, or marketers. Because of its basis in individual social comparison, fashion cannot be controlled without undermining its ultimate purpose, which is the expression of individual identity. If self-identity were never in doubt and social comparison never took place, there would be no demand for fashion, and there would be no need or opportunity for style change. - Aubrey Cannon

Fashion is capitalism's favourite child. - Werner Sombart

Fashion is conceived as irrational because it changes constantly, has no content, works as an external decoration, and carries no intellectual elements. - Yuniya Kawamura

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only; fashion is something in the air. It's the wind that blows in the new fashion; you feel it coming, you smell it. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. - Coco Chanel

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein. - Quentin Crisp

Fashion is not usually amenable to reason and common sense; argument, entreaty, ridicule, are each and all alike in turn powerless in the matter. - Pye Henry Chavasse

Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life. - Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Fashion is one of the great living arts of civilisation and self-decoration one of the fundamental human urges. - Janey Ironside

Fashion is socially reproductive, training us to be flexible and responsive to change in a fast-changing world. - Caroline Evans

Fashion is the great governor of this world; it presides, not only in matters of dress and amusement, but in law, physic, politics, religion, and all other things of the gravest kind; indeed, the wisest of men would be puzzled to give any better reason why particular forms in all these have been at certain times universally received, and at others universally rejected, than that they were in or out of fashion. - Henry Fielding

Fashion is unpredictable. Fashion changes overnight. Fashion is whimsy. - Michael E. Gerber

Fashion is what you adopt when you do not know who you are. - Unknown

Fashions change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come. - Dante Alighieri

Fashions fade, style is eternal. - Yves Saint Laurent

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

I always believed that style was more important than fashion. They are rare, those who imposed their style while fashion makers are so numerous. - Yves Saint Laurent

If you ride a trend, make sure you can spot its tail. Many people failed because they did not see the impending change in trend. - Unknown

In dress, seek the middle between foppery and shabbiness. - Horace Mann

Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity. - Charles Caleb Colton

Many-tinted are the eyes of fashion. - Edward Counsel

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes. - E. M. Forster

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always 20 times better. - Margaret Oliphant

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it. - Yves Saint-Laurent

Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it. - Yves Saint Laurent

Singularity in dress argues eccentricity of character. A queer cut of the coat represents a crotchet in the brain. - Christian Nestell Bovee

Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic. - James Laver

The erogenous zone is always shifting, and it is the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever catching it up. - James Laver

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

The fashion wears out more apparel than the man. - William Shakespear

The irrational aspect of fashion is very important; fashion provides a field for the expression of fetishistic and magical impulses and beliefs. - Elizabeth Wilson

The last person to adopt a ridiculous fashion suffers more derision than the one who first adopted it. - Lewis F. Korns

The perfection of dress lies in the union of three requisites: in its being comfortable, inexpensive, and in good taste. It should not be so far removed from the prevailing mode as to excite attention, nor yet so far within the fashion as to imply a weak submission to it. - Christian Nestell Bovee

There would not be so much harm in the giddy following the fashions, if somehow the wise could always set them. - Christian Nestell Bovee

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