Quotes and Noteworthy Posts
•Fashion is the context that we live in, the trends that cycle in and out. It is the industry, the magazines, and the advertisements that form the dominant paradigm. Style is what we choose to do with it. - Monica Miller
•Just as we have our own personal flourishes when we speak, we convey personality, emotion, and back story through our fashion choices. But while we use language as a way to express our inner thoughts and feelings, we also use it to make ourselves legible to other people. If clothing is a language, it must have a vocabulary and a grammar like other languages. - Alison Lurie
•I don’t really believe in trends, personally, because people decide what the trend is. One year ago, it was all about fluorescent things and I don’t know anyone around me who dressed in fluo, so it doesn’t really mean anything. I do think movement and evolution are important, but nobody should force himself to follow a trend because there’s nothing more important than honesty and style. Sometimes when I’m thinking about trend, I forget the idea of style, and for me the main thing is the style. If you really focus on trends, it means you can be someone in winter and be someone else in summer. - Guillaume Henry
How would you relate the concept of “fashion” to one of “style”?
•Fashion and style as they relate to an individual is pretty clear: fashion even if one were to argue that it can originate through the vision of an individual, the designer…like Dior’s “New Look”…is essentially a collective phenomenon. To participate fully in fashion one must accede to the prevailing trends which are the consequence of a critical mass of consumers. Of course there is always the possibility of editing and modifying the menu of fashion options to one’s personal taste, but to be fashionable is in the end to participate in a consensus. Style for the individual on the other hand is necessarily a series of subjective preferences and decisions that can range from a complete concession to la mode or a move toward an individual expression that, in its extreme, ignores or even rejects prevailing fashions. Many people who are known for their “style” seem to have mediated fashionable convention and its rules with distinctive personal taste and idiosyncrasy. The pitfall of too individuated an identity, of course, is eccentricity which can be amusing. However, “amusing” isn’t, when applied to issues of dress, generally in the same sentence as “alluring” or “elegant.” - Harold Koda
What does fashion have to do with intellectuality?
•If I were seeking out great fashion icons, it wouldn’t be my first impulse to search the rosters of Nobel laureates or members of the Academie Francaise. On the other hand, an examination of the lives of the greatest women of style generally reveals individuals of some cultural sophistication. I can’t think of anyone who is known for her stylishness to be stupid or purely instinctive. The memorable women of fashion have to be intelligent enough to understand the rules and codes, often nuanced, implicit in fashion, and how far they can go in testing the limits and boundaries of those accepted standards. I love the fact that when someone is perfectly put together they are said to look “smart.” That’s as intellectual as fashion has to be. - Harold Koda
At what point does fashion become more than clothes to a person?
•I think it happens in a different place for different people. I’ve always been very introspective so perhaps I was set up for this mindset ahead of time, I don’t know.
But I do know that at some point I stopped thinking about fashion as a way to define myself for others and more as a natural function of how I relate to the world.
It went from being focused around acquisition and self-definition through object fetish to a means by which to reconcile my personal philosophies with the often disparate world around me.
For example, huge hoods. They’re a tool. They offer me privacy and warmth in an often cold city where I’m surrounded by cameras and without personal space. Some people like the way they look - I know I do - but I value them more on account of how they make living in a cold, crowded surveillance society a little bit more palatable.
Before I reached that tipping point, I think I would not have been as influenced by real world need as I am today.
I think I also became VERY aware that fashion draws its influences from far more places than just other fashion. I see in certain pieces the relaxed urbanity of a wealthy city, or a light fog rising off of a lake with the smell of pine and earth underneath it all.
In the world fashion thread the other day I had an interesting discussion about this with timber and TurnLeft. How do things like environment and the sound of our language affect the way we design and implement our styles? It’s a hard thing to pin down exactly, but I can look at the patterns of an Inca ritual mask and see the curves of jungle rivers, the lush green canopy overhead. I can see those influences in the works of yesteryear and I can see them today.
In summary, the tipping point was when I truly began to understand fashion as a language borne out of both self-expression and need.
Besides, let’s be honest - is just laying down cash on one piece after another without pondering the why and how really enough? Don’t you want to know why? - Poet
•Clothes are codes that are rapidly decoded by the human brain in the first seconds of meeting someone. These codes hold information about cultural preferences, background, consumption habits and tastes; all of which is very important for group creation and hierarchy in complex, modern, western societies. I, like everyone else, am trying to impress the group of people I consider and want to be a part of; professionally, socially, culturally, sexually etc. If you are not able to play this very important and simple game, you are going to have a difficult time; presentation is important, it encodes a lot of the things by which you will be catalogued for posterity. Before you say you just pick up whatever is laying around and that you don’t care, you need to know that what was lying around was picked for you and the “not caring” is part of your choices and coding, and people will measure and judge you accordingly. Image is not all, but it has a very important and deep effect in the subconsciousness of individuals and the culture that comprises them - Anonymous
Why is being fashionable and caring about how you look considered a homosexual activity?
•Calling you a faggot is just a cheap way for the intimidated less-thans to quell the cognitive dissonance they’re feeling. They might feel they’ll never dress on your level, but that’s okay, because you love the cock. It’s just a way for them to terminate their own analytic process, which if left unchecked would leave them with a rather unpleasant awareness of their own status. - Poet
•The coolest thing is when you don’t care about being cool anymore. Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac - that’s what really sums up style for me. - Rick Owens
•I’m more interested in impressing people whose taste i admire if anything, and to wear things that i feel comfortable in and is an extension of myself. - Anonymous
•Fashion should be symbiotic expression of what you are rather than a mask. When you do not have balance between who you are and what you wear, your presence creates a dissonance and people turn from you. - Alesha (StyleZeitgeist)
