Fashion Symbolism Quotes

The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.

I don't have very much interest in trends and fashions. I don't follow the fashion shows and stuff like that into my real life. But I'm very, very interested in how people put themselves together, how women and men announce themselves to the world, through what they put on their bodies. Whether we choose Birkenstocks or whether we choose Burberry - it all signifies something and it's really interesting to me.

I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.

The flat-brimmed cap is the modern day dunce cap.

The high-heeled shoe is a marvellously contradictory item; it brings a woman to a man's height but makes sure she cannot keep up with him.

On a meaningful day, everything you wear can have meaning. It becomes what I wore That Day, whether that day is a beginning or an end.

In general, fashion is decorative, it's protective, it acknowledges that the world does involve conflict, and you might be attacked by assumptions, presumptions, and attitudes.

I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.

Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

Come on, let's face it. Jeans are like a Volvo or a Saab, or Prius, it's a liberal status symbol. Jeans are liberal status symbols. I know everybody wears 'em now. It's another battle we've lost. We run around looking like a bunch of hippies, and I'm not going to do it.

She's got a big belt around her hips. It has a shiny buckle with PRADA on it, which is Italian for insecure.

The suit is the polite taming, the socialising, the neutering, of riding and military kit. Those pointless buttons on the cuff were moved from lateral to vertical.

The apparent pointlessness of fashion may be just what makes it so strong as a zeitgeist sensor. Even I, a designer, do not know why a certain proportion feels dated or why another one feels exciting at a given moment. I leave that to the cultural historians and theorists.

How enlightened is wearing God like some do Versace?

The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting - to see what people do with it. That's more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look.

Throughout history, clothes represented who you were; they are a great vehicle for explaining who you are. During the Ching dynasty, for example, what you wore and how it was made reflected your status in society. People could literally read your clothes like a book, just by its color and how it was embroidered.