Anna Held Quotes

I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.

Anytime I don't have to wear a bra is a good day.

When I'm designing, I'm thinking about what it would be like to wear that piece.

I like to take my time when I'm designing and constructing outfits.

A lot of my designs are inspired by the 1930s, when people were fabulous at dressing up. Then it just all kind of fell away.

Bras are like accessories to me.

There are three fashion periods: the past, the present and Mae West.

I've got a couple of those Gossard Wonderbras. They are so brilliant, I swear, even I get cleavage with them.

If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

I really learned a lot from collecting clothes because I got to go back into the history of fashion and fashion photography and jewelry. It changed how I felt about fashion and about what I did forever because I used to look a little bit down on myself for it.

This all came of a conversation I had with [John] Steinbeck once when we were standing in a men's room somewhere. Steinbeck asked me why I didn't play the banjo any more and I told him that went out with the high-button shoes.

It's pretty awesome to see people dressed up in period clothing and running around on horses and in carriages and all that kind of thing. Part of the fun of making a period film is just that playfulness. It's just like make believe when you're a child except you get to do it for a real job.

Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.

...catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves...I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.

The female covers her breasts, and then proceeds to redefine their shape with a brassiere. This sexual signaling device may be padded or inflatable, so that it not only reinstates the concealed shape, but also enlarges it, imitating in this way the breast swelling that occurs during sexual arousal.

It's interesting to speculate how it developed that in two of the most anti-feminist institutions, the church and the law court, the men are wearing the dresses.

Elizabeth Kennedy is so chic. Her gowns have such structure, I feel like a work of art.

The Frenchman invented the ruffle; the Englishman added the shirt.

A silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have broken the heart of John Calvin.

One of them hung a pink bra from our lighting fixture. I left it there. It was a nice bra

It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.

What a pretty thing man is when he goes in his doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!

And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plagueisdoneastoperiwigs, fornobody will daretobuy any haire for fear of the infectionthat it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.

All my seams have meaning - they emphasize something about the body.

Naturally looking at something will become so important in your aesthetic. For that, you have to be disciplined, too, in the way that there is a moment to catch and there is a moment to express. The moment to express has to be so pragmatic, because you have to build the clothes; you have to be very, very specific about how you want to describe to other people, for the color of the fabric, the way of sewing things, putting things together.