Quotes About Fashion and Clothes

[Faust]

It's fantastic, but I really do wish I had the context this time...what does he mean by giving it "insufficient thought?" It almost contradicts the painful self-consciousness of the passage.



Some wise words from Lord Chesterfield:

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.

My interpretation was that because he had given clothes insufficient thought, as most people do, he was convinced that there exist clothes only of a certain kind (a crappy one) and therefore he decided he'd be best better off thinking that he doesn't care about clothes at all.

[todestrieb]

"Incredible though it may seem, the Dandies once had a fancy for torn clothes [as Baudelaire observed, a true dandy can have the sartorial appearance of a "chiffonnier"].... They had ... their clothes torn, before wearing them, through the whole extent of the cloth; so that they became a sort of lace - a cloud. They wanted to walk like Gods in their clouds! The operation was difficult and tedious of execution; a piece of pointed glass was employed for the purpose. There you have a true detail of Dandyism, where clothes go for nothing, in fact they hardly exist."

- Barbey d'Aurevilly

[todestrieb]

In fetishism, the sexus puts down barriers separating the organic and the inorganic world. Clothing and jewelry are its allies. It is as much at home with what is dead as it is with the living flesh. And the latter directs the accommodation of the sexus in the former. The hair is a confined region between both realms of the sexus. Another realm reveals itself in the raptures of passion: the landscape of the body. These have ceased already to be animated, yet are still accessible to the eye, which, of course, as it ventures further, relinquishes its lead through this realm of death more and more to the sensations of touch and smell. Within a dream breasts often begin to swell, dressed like the earth in woods and rocks, and glances have sunk their lives far below the water surfaces that slumber in the valleys. These landscapes are crossed by paths that escort the sexus to the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium that lures it even deeper into the material world.

- Walter Benjamin

[BeauIXI]

Who doesn't love Bejamin?

"I'm married. I can wear whatever I want." -Larry David

[todestrieb]

Canonic quote,

"[F]ashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change."

- Georg Simmel

[Faust]

/\ our ambivalence is well put here

[Lumina]

Il devrait s’agir de plaisir : plaisir du corps, plaisir du jeu, plaisir de s’habiller, de s’habiller pareil ou de s’habiller autrement, plaisir parfois de se déguiser, plaisir de se découvrir, d’imaginer, plaisir de retrouver quelque chose, plaisir de changer. Cela s’appelerait la mode : une manière de jouissance, le sentiment d’une petite fête, d’un gaspillage ; quelque chose de futile, d’inutile, de gratuit, d’agréable.
[...]
Mais ce n’est pas ça, évidemment pas ça du tout. Avant même de commencer à parler de la mode, avant que les faits de mode ne soient éclairés par les lumières plus ou moins chatoyantes des diverses idéologies contemporaines, on sait déjà que ce ne sera pas ça. La mode, pourtant, parle de caprice, de spontanéité, de fantaisie, d’invention, de frivolité.
Mais ce sont des mensonges : la mode est entièrement du côté de la violence : violence de la conformité, de l’adhérence aux modèles, violence du consensus social et du mépris qu’il dissimule.

George Perec, Douze regards obliques.

[Faust]

I'm not an artist. I make clothes.

- Rei Kawakubo

[Faust]

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have the same, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

-- Virginia Woolf, Orlando.

[Fade to Black]

I'm not an artist. I make clothes.

- Rei Kawakubo

heh, I smiled at this one. But given Rei's persona, I can't help but think there lies at least a hint of self-consciousness behind it.

[Atom]

"I react against everything that's chic and traditional. If you don't revolt, then you don't go anywhere."

-Martin Margiela, 1989.

[Faust]

/\ Print it out and mail it to Mail-Moth.

[Fade to Black]

"If you don't revolt, then you don't go anywhere."

-Martin Margiela, 1989.

Immortal

[TadaoAndo]

"Pink is the navy blue of India"

- Diana Vreeland

[JoniF]

"A designer is only as good as the star who wears her clothes."

—Edith Head