Quotes on Fashion

Quotes on fashion arranged alphabetically, by author.

The lamb began to follow the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
––Aesop

The difference between style and fashion is quality.
––Giorgio Armani

The goal I seek is to have people refine their style through my clothing without having them become victims of fashion.
––Giorgio Armani

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
––Francis Bacon, Sr.

The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.
––Cecil Beaton

Fashion is a social agreement. It is the result of a consensus of a large group of people.
––Stella Blum

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.
––Coco Chanel

A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion.
––Coco Chanel

Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.
––Edna Woolman Chase

[A]ll of the fashion magazines said [Björk] was the worst dressed, but when they say you're the worst, that means you're the best.
––Margaret Cho, on Björk's "swan dress"

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
––Jean Cocteau

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
––Quentin Crisp

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

Style is an expression of individualism mixed with charisma. Fashion is something that comes after style.
––John Fairchild

As a fashion designer, I was always aware that I was not an artist, because I was creating something that was made to be sold, marketed, used, and ultimately discarded.
––Tom Ford

Even knowledge has to be in the fashion, and where it is not, it is wise to affect ignorance.
––Baltasar Gracian

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
––Goethe

Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
––William Hazlitt, On the Clerical Character, 1819

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
––Lillian Hellman, in a letter to the HUAC Committee

The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.
––Paris Hilton

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
––Edwin Hubbel

For me fashion is nothing more than a spontaneous antidepressant.
––Eugene Hütz

Fashion for the most part is nothing but the ostentation of riches.
––John Locke

Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.
––Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.
––Moliere

I'm not that interested in fashion... When someone says that lime-green is the new black for this season, you just want to tell them to get a life.
––Bruce Oldfield

Fashion is a tool... to compete in life outside the home. People like you better, without knowing why, because people always react well to a person they like the looks of.
––Mary Quant

I base most of my fashion sense on what doesn't itch.
––Gilda Radner

It pains me physically to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion.
––Yves Saint Laurent

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
––George Santayana

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

In difficult times fashion is always outrageous.
––Elsa Schiaparelli

Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.
––Elsa Schiaparelli

We live not according to reason, but according to fashion.
––Seneca

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

Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.
––Georg Simmel

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
––Logan Pearsall Smith

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

As to matters of dress, I would recommend one never to be first in the fashion nor the last out of it.
––John Wesley

Fashion is about eventually becoming naked.
––Vivienne Westwood

Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.
––Vivienne Westwood

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
––Oscar Wilde

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

Related Reading:

Men's Style - The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress

Audrey Hepburn Quotes

Learned Ugliness (A.K.A. the Ugly Duckling Syndrome

Harold and Maude - A Style in Film Review

Smokey Eyes Tutorial

Return to our quotes section.

Return to Enjoy Your Style's home page.

Search Enjoy Your Style: