Quotes About Fashion and Clothes

[sbw4224]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



Even more Yohji: "Fashion consists of both commerce and creation. You need to find the right balance, if not you cannot continue. Though I will always defend a very pure creation, I should not forget that I am responsible for the jobs of the five hundred people working for Yohji Yamamoto."</p>

"I prefer to show the hidden body. I'm a man but I think that what is on the inside is the sexiest. If this season I have suggested a symbolic body by using pleats and tucks to indicate the figure, the bosom, the side, the back, it is because I don't like to show the body ostentatiously. I prefer to dream. In Japan, all the girls wear low-slung trousers. When I see how important the body has beome, the triumph of cosmetics and plastic surgery, I wonder if clothes are still necessary."
</p>


</p>

[Faust]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



Not so much fashion, but very much related.</p>


"The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone sensitive to romantic Quality just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of other objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."</p>

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</p>

[laika]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress



Interesting stuff, Faust, especially when read after that Yohji quote sbw posted! I'm curious to know what his definition of "style" is and how/why it's opposed to quality...</p>

(good morning all, btw [|-)])</p>

[Faust]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

[quote user="laika"]

Interesting stuff, Faust, especially when read after that Yohji quote sbw posted! I'm curious to know what his definition of "style" is and how/why it's opposed to quality...</p>

(good morning all, btw [|-)])</p>

[/quote]</p>

Good morning. I would think his definition of style is whatever is not phony. What he means by style here is kitsch, I think. So, it's not so much "style" that ticks him off, but "stylized," meaning faked up, spruced up, slicked up, etc. He is looking for authenticity. Quality is reality, and stylization is fakery.</p>

[Ann romance]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

"We all die, the goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will".

[laika]

Re: Quotes about Fashion



Thought I would bump this, since there are various strains of talk about body, clothes, movement etc, all over the board, and some interesting and relevant words in this thread.</p>

I was almost going to post this in the style philosophy thread, but it really belongs here.</p>

"What I'm not trying to do with my clothes is to make a kind of shell
that stays in place half an inch away from the body. My clothes are
dynamic. They pull and they push and they slightly fall off. There's more
to clothes than just comfort. Even if they're not quite comfortable and slip
and have to be readjusted now and again I don't mind, because that's some
sort of display and gesture that belongs with the clothes."</p>

--Vivienne Westwood</p>

[Chinorlz]

Re: Quotes about Fashion



"when it comes to handbags, everyone is model size"</P>


- Karl Lagerfeld</P>
<P mce_keep="true"></P>

[Faust]

Re: Quotes about Fashion

[quote user="Chinorlz"]

"when it comes to handbags, everyone is model size"</p>


- Karl Lagerfeld</p>
<p mce_keep="true"></p>

[/quote]</p>

Bingo. A perfect way to summarize financial success of big fashion houses. I've always said as much.
</p>

Beautiful quote by Viv, laika.</p>

</p>

[mass]

Re: Quotes about Fashion

some choice quotes from a peter saville article from 2003 (i think):



Now, he says, we've got to the stage where, not only do "we all know how to dress"; now the industry's ruled over by just a handful of corporations: "Do you want to help buy Miuccia Prada's next house in Sardinia?" he protests. "I feel that certainly over the last five years not only have we got to the point where fashion doesn't matter, it has got to another point where it's a negative symbol of yourself."



"Design needs to be something you invest belief in. I don't believe in most things we have now in an over-commodified culture. Design over the last twenty-five years has played a big part in the democratisation of culture - vastly increasing the choice and experience range that people have. When I was twenty I really had to go out and search for clothes. Now everything is all there, whether it's clothes, furniture, restaurants. The entire culture has been downloaded en masse. The design I was idealistic about was the benchmarks - a Corbusier chair, a Chanel suit, a Porsche 911, a Nikon camera, a Saul Bass film title. Those things are still the canon of design and are quintessentially 'true'. And they were socially oriented - part of the idea of this democratisation. Coco Chanel made trousers for women and there was a social message." He points to his Charles Eames desk chair in his large all-white studio/living space in which a long clothes rack separates his bed from his work units. "It was designed forty or fifty years ago and is still perhaps the best modern desk chair. It works and is still relevant now. What we see in fashion is like this new bling baroque. It has its own redundancy written into it. That's not my understanding of design. Fashion's role in social democratisation is over."

[matthewhk]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

[quote user="laika"]

Wim Wenders, on first wearing clothes by Yamamoto.</p>

"I had bought a shirt and a jacket. You know the sensation you feel when you put on a new garment: you look in the mirror, happy and a bit excited in your new skin. But wearing that shirt and jacket I was different; they were old and new at the same time. In the mirror I was myself, undoubtedly, only I was more myself than before. I had a strange sensation...yes, I was wearing the shirt par excellence and the perfect jacket, and beneath them I was myself. I felt protected, like a knight in his armor."
</p>

[/quote]</p>

this is absolutely brilliant and exactly how I feel any time I put on any of my Yamamoto. I'm putting this in my facebook fav. quotes...
</p>

[matthewhk]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

[quote user="laika"]

More Yohji:</p>

<span id="?intelliTXT&quot;"><font color="Gray">
"I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I
want so see scars, failure, disorder, distortion. If I can feel those
things in work by others, then I like them. Perfection is a kind of
order, like overall harmony and so on... They are things someone forces
on to a thing. A free human being does not desire such things. And yet
I get the feeling there are a lot of women who do not seek freedom;
women who wear symmetrical clothes."</font></span>
</p>

[/quote]</p>

I've read this a long time ago but forgot where, thank you very much for posting it. This is exactly how I view clothes.</p>

Man, I don't think too much about getting dressed or shopping, but when I have time I spend a lot of it thinking about my relationship with clothing, and i love reading this thread because it feels comforting to know there's a whole world out there who sees things in a similar way to myself, but can articulate it so much better than I ever could.
</p>

[laika]

Re: Quotes about Fashion



About style rather than fashion, and from a weird source (via John Berger), but I liked the sentiment:</p>

"I have no patience with the untorn, anyone who
hasn't weathered rough weather , fallen apart, been
ripped to pieces, put herself back together, big
stitches, jagged cuts, nothing nice. Then something
shines out. But these ones all shined up on the out-
side, the ass wigglers, I'll be honest, I don't like them.
Not at all."</p>

--Andrea Dworkin</p>

(I like to picture Michelle Lamy saying this in her heavy french accent.)</p>

[Faust]

Re: Quotes about Fashion

hmmm, almost 12 hours since laika's post and no frankenstein pictures yet?

[mamaboy]

Re: Fernando Pessoa--The Green Dress

[quote user="matthewhk"][quote user="laika"]


More Yohji:</P>


<SPAN id='?intelliTXT"'><FONT color=gray>"I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want so see scars, failure, disorder, distortion. If I can feel those things in work by others, then I like them. Perfection is a kind of order, like overall harmony and so on... They are things someone forces on to a thing. A free human being does not desire such things. And yet I get the feeling there are a lot of women who do not seek freedom; women who wear symmetrical clothes."</FONT></SPAN>
</P>


[/quote]</P>


I've read this a long time ago but forgot where, thank you very much for posting it. This is exactly how I view clothes.</P>


Man, I don't think too much about getting dressed or shopping, but when I have time I spend a lot of it thinking about my relationship with clothing, and i love reading this thread because it feels comforting to know there's a whole world out there who sees things in a similar way to myself, but can articulate it so much better than I ever could.
</P>


[/quote]</P>


i went to yoji store--nothing even comes close to eloquent wenders description</P>


a lot of corny stuff--pigeons on jackets....where is poetry? </P>


decent ruff cardigan....and ugly shiny pin ....eeeee</P>


where is wenders ' yoji ?</P>

[gerry]

Re: Quotes About Fashion

[quote user="laika"]

[From The Book of Disquiet. This is amazing, and rather appropriate to this forum, I think.]
</p><p class="MsoNormal">"I'm in a trolley, and, as is my habit, I'm slowlytaking notice of the people sitting around me. For me details are things,words, sentences. I take apart the dress worn by the girl in front of me: Iturn it into the fabric that makes it up, the work that went into making it -but still I see it as a dress and not cloth - and the light embroidery and thework involved in it. And immediately, as in a primer on political economy, thefactories and the labor unfold before me - the factory where the cloth was made,the factory where the twist of silk, darker in tone than the dress, was made,which went into making the twisted little things in the border now in theirplace next to the neck; and I see the components of the factories, themachines, the workers, the seamstresses, my eyes turned inward penetrate intothe offices, I see the managers trying to be calm, I follow, in the books, theaccounts involved in it all; but it isn't only that: I see, beyond that, thedomestic lives of those who live their social lives in those factories andthose offices ... All of them pass before my eyes merely because I have beforeme, below a dark neck, which on its other side has I don't know what sort offace, a common, irregular green edge on a light green dress.

The entire life of society lies before my eyes.

Beyond all that I sense the loves, the secret life, the souls of all those whoworked so that this woman seated in front of me in the trolley can wear aroundher neck the sinuous banality of a band of dark green silk on less dark greencloth.

I become stupefied. The seats on the trolley, made of tightly woven strongstraw, carry me to distant regions and into multiple industries, workers,workers' houses, lives, realities, all.

I leave the trolley exhausted and sleepwalking. I just lived an entire life."<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>

[/quote]</p>

I apologize for having to refer to the original post, but I just thought it was interesting how the phrases like "weaving a plot," "plot threads," and "spinning a tale" are often used.</p>