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“A history of fashion is a history of life: ‘To be out of fashion is to be out of life,' said Colley Cibber in the eighteenth century and this, like many semi-ironical statements, is true. The way people dress is a reflection of their times as well as of their class, financial status and of the local weather.”
-- From Janey Ironside, Introduction to Fashion: From ancient Egypt to the Present Day
- Fashion: “… the prevailing or preferred practice in dress, manners,
behavior, or the like, at a given time. … can denote custom or practice
that prevails among any group of persons. Usually, however, it specifies
such practice that follows the conventions of polite society or
mass culture.”
-- From American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd college edition
- Fashion: “the cultural construction of the embodied identity”
-- From “Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture” Editorial Policy
- “While fashions in furniture and architecture have not generally
been perceived as a problem, fashionable dress has been frequently
criticized by clergy, philosophers, moralists, and academics for centuries.
The condemnations have been numerous and varying; fashionable clothes
are attacked for encouraging vanity, loose sexual morality, conspicuous
consumption, and effeminacy (in men), and thus blamed for all manner
of social breakdown and sexual and gender confusion.”
-- From Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Detroit, vol. 2, p13
- “Designers in the twenty-first century are beginning to adopt
new technologies such as body-scanning for custom fit, along with
seamless and whole garment knitting technologies, which can manufacture
garments with the push of a button. Both are forerunners in a movement
toward automation that will once again revolutionize the fashion
industry. Just as the sewing machine changed the face of fashion
in the past, technology will change it in the future.”
-- From Future of the fashion designer, p.37
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Famous Fashion Quotes :
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
--Oscar Wilde (Irish poet, dramatist, and critic, 1854-1900)“Fashions fade, style is eternal.”
--Yves Saint Laurent (French fashion designer, 1936-)“A good model can advance fashion by ten years."
--Yves Saint Laurent (French fashion designer, 1936-)
“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”
--Coco Chanel (French fashion designer, 1883-1971)“Fashion condemns us to many follies; the greatest is to make ourselves its slave.”
--Napoleon Bonaparte (French general, politician, and emperor, 1769-1821)“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 (Italian-born French designer, 1896-1973)“Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.”
--George Bernard Shaw (Irish dramatist, 1856-1950) from The Doctor's Dilemma“A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.”
--Sophia Loren (Italian actress, 1934-)“A designer is only as good as the star who wears her clothes.”
-- Edith Head (Hollywood Costume designer, 1897-1981)
An Women's History Month Exhibit of the Old Dominion University Libraries