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
