Pamela Druckerman Quotes

It's no secret that in our society, and many before, people are trend followers. For some reason, they feel better about themselves if they are dressed in the latest fashion or have the newest tech gadget.

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.

All this fashion stuff - who's cool now - is just a bigger version of the cool kids versus the nerds.

We use fashion for status and to beautify and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes completely unbalanced, then you're living a decadent life. And when that happens on a global scale, you're living in a decadent world.

That's a thing you most look forward to as a kid. The newest clothes or the newest shoes. Definitely getting the newest shoes and bragging to your friends about it.

New York has definitely turned into more of, like, a hipster place.

Many a family, in order to make a 'proper showing,' will commit itself for a larger and more expensive house than is needed, in an expensive neighborhood. Almost everyone would, it seems, like to keep up with the Joneses.

No one would argue against the fact that L.A. leads the country in opportunities for being hip and pretentious.

My hairdresser and I found ourselves shopping at Bloomingdale's with nothing to do for days.

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.

To me, growing up in South Wales, a pair of Diesel jeans were the thing to have - if you could afford them.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

There's always going to be someone with a bigger toy than yours.

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.

Fashion is an industry to make money. It plays into human psychology. We want to belong, we want to be loved. I'm not trying to demonize the fashion industry - I love the fashion industry - but style is about taking the control out of the industry's hand and having you decide what works for you.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

I've always been a free trader. I trade freely on Bond street, Rodeo Drive, Fifth Avenue, Worth Avenue.

We judge of entire nations by the productions of a few mechanical arts, and think we are talking of men, while we are boasting of their estates, their dress, and their palaces. The sense in which we apply the terms, great, and noble, high rank, and high life, show, that we have, on such occasions, transferred the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage; and that excellence itself is, in our esteem, a mere pageant, adorned at a great expense, by the labors of many workmen.

We're told that to be fly, you gotta have a fly car, the rims on your wheels, the fly jewels, and that to work a regular job and make legal money is uncool.

Customers often value a good more when its price goes up. One reason may be its signaling value. An expensive handcrafted mechanical watch may tell time no more accurately than a cheap quartz model; but, because few people can afford one, buying it signals that the owner is rich.

As handbags get ever more absurdly large, so they need to carry more stuff to validate the expense of this huge trunk with chains, buckles and padlocks on.

Real fashion is something you don't need - it's something you want.

It's sad, the enslavement of the black underclass to designer labels - we're an age that cares more about Versace than Vermeer.

The downside to the Whole Foods experience is that its success is driven by one of our era's more grotesque phenomena: the upwardly-mobile urban dweller, the one who wants to indulge class-conscious epicurean yearnings and save the world, too.

Maybe I'll buy myself a nice Gucci bag.