Quotes About Fashion and Clothes

[Defender]

Delight in Disorder
BY ROBERT HERRICK

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

This is my favorite poem about fashion. The bold couplet is the famous quote.

[ES3K]

Alber Elbaz: "Perfection always scares me. When people say, 'Everything is wonderful' I know something is wrong"

Source: http://www.style.com/fashion-shows/f...to-wear/lanvin

Side note: his Lanvin collection yesterday was perfection, IMHO

[Faust]

Fran Lebowitz on men in shorts

"There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I'd just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? It's repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously."

[petricor]

Fran Lebowitz on men in shorts

"There are few things I would rather see less, to tell you the truth. I'd just as soon see someone coming toward me with a hand grenade. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? It's repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously."

the whole thing cracked me up. her quote on being ugly could've been straight from gervais' the invention of lying.

[MJRH]

"I'm writing now a song called 'Dead Fish Blues,'" Touitou says.
It is a song, in his telling, about judgment--deserved and otherwise. "It's symbolic, because it's a fish that got stupid enough with his ignorance of what the hook could be. The fish, ignorant, he goes after the hook. He can't swim anymore. He's not in the sea anymore. You get it? And then he's delivered in a restaurant. So he's dead one time, all right. He's delivered in a very good fish restaurant, where the chef cooks the sea bass in the exquisite way. He steams it, but on a bed of seaweed. So far, one could say that's a dignified end to that fish, who was ignorant enough. He's sort of okay. But then comes in the restaurant a fashion-editor woman. She can't use the knife, really. So she takes the fork in the right hand and takes the flesh, like this--" he mimes laying waste to a fish--"and it looks like a mess on the plate. And the maitre d' comes and says, 'Madame, you just killed him a second time.'

!!!

[Faust]

Lol, but why the fashion editor?

[MJRH]

It didn't have to be fashion. I think there's always someone who dismays the maitre d'—no matter the city, someone somewhere will butcher the fish. But Touitou works in fashion, so for him, it had to be a fashion editor...

And I just realized this echoes that old parable, about how those who know one should not eat fish with a knife may eat fish with a knife.

[MJRH]

Intellectual Fashion
Raymond Queneau, 1935

Fashion is a basic element of our—of your—civilization. "Blown on the wind," continually shifting and remaking itself: that is its beauty, and its excuse. Those who create and set Fashions—the real kind—are aware of Fashion's nature, if I may judge by the example of Mademoiselle Chanel, who in a recent article described it as "an ephemeral creation whose sole virtue is to die quickly, only to be reborn in a more surprising form with every season."

But this is precisely what those who believe they can set Intellectual Fashions—and particularly those who let themselves be swept up by them—fail to realize. For Fashion rules the sciences and what people call philosophy even more than it does the arts. The history of Western culture no longer takes the form of a continuous evolution, a series of advances, nor as a dialectical process, a battle of tendencies leading to ever-higher creations; instead, it's an incoherent succession of crazes, some of which scarcely survive for a few months, and of disenchantments, which, for their part, are absolutely decisive. Some among us would see this as the very stuff of life; but in fact, to put the best possible face on it, it is only the irresistible effect of what Fourier calls the "Butterfly" passion. The spectacle of these mutations, these sudden swings and conversions, never fails to amuse in a vague sort of way. More amusing still is the naivete of those who let themselves be convinced, again and again, that the real thing has finally come. They follow along, sheep-like, from Einstein to technocracy, from quantum theory to the Five-Year Plan, from neo-Thomism to dialectical materialism, never straying, anxious to keep up (one, two! one, two!), docile as can be; and how many yokes they must shoulder to stay up to date! A woman putting on her new dress knows she won't be able to wear it once the next season comes, but those who hurry to board the latest boat never realize how, oh! how utterly ridiculous they'll seem in a few years, a few months, a few weeks.

Reread the Symbolists and the scientists who flourished back in the age of Art Nouveau. Those who launch the boats have often already glimpsed the little crack that will soon turn into a major leak. A shipwreck is guaranteed. Climb aboard, but let's hope you know how to swim.

The years preceding the war brought the triumph of Fashion in every domain; those were the days of the Ballets Ruses, and of Monsieur Bergson's lectures at the College de France. More precisely, let's say it all started in the year of the comet—the comet of 1910, that is. How many fashions have come along in the past twenty-five years, offering themselves, imposing themselves, no sooner born than already withering! How seriously their "adherents" always took themselves! Such people love to proclaim that seeking is better than finding; and yet, again and again, without fail, they climbed into their pulpits and declared not "Here is the latest thing" but "Here is the truth." No longer was fashion worn on the back alone; it now had a place under the parietal bone, too. There was the year of short skirts and the season of red hats. You'll see a great many people dressed in Hegel this spring, but once fall comes around, Kierkegaard will be the thing. Wirehaired terriers and wave mechanics are beginning to "fade." Back to poodles and Descartes.

Some would see a sign of progress in the succession of tics and fads. In its own world, Fashion always wins, but everywhere else fashion is only a series of failures, of flawed understandings, of approximations confidently taken for truths. And so civilization begins to make faces: now it closes its eyes to study the latest painting (very chic), now it opens its mouth to take in the chatter of the newest small-time prophet (very distinguished).

No doubt it's very nice to be up to date and in the know, and no doubt it's unpleasant to be dressed in last year's clothes. One shudders to think of all the young people just up from the provinces, still playing with yo-yos and reading Politzer. The land of the used-to-bes has become the richest of all kingdoms.

Fashion is born in order to disappear: it aims only for the present moment. Intellectual fashions, unfortunately, aspire to endure; they last only as long as it takes for their bones to go white. The great movements of history have nothing to do with fashion. But the form in which recent movements have come to the public displays just that ephemeral character, rendering their force purely illusory. Legitimate is the enthusiasm that welcomes a great work, that hails its birth and remains vigorous through peace and war; but the success that more than one theory has enjoyed in our time was never anything more than a vogue, either because the public, and even what you call the elite, is no longer capable of responding to them, or because the theories on offer in fact deserve nothing more than a brief stagnation. I have on the other hand only respect for the aforementioned elite, who, through constant, praiseworthy effort, keep current with the many advances in letters, sciences, arts, and the rest.

And I bow down very low before our snobs. At least they know what's what.

[Faust]

Haha,excellent - thanks for posting!

[MJRH]

Queneau is always so far ahead of his time. The one thing he didn't see coming was intellectual fashion merging with fashion proper; now that people have intellectualized fashion, it's become subject to the same bullshit—like the bloody trad-menswear craze of how to dress timelessly/clothing-not-fashion... it's important to wear a suit, here's how your grandpa shaved etc.