Quotes by British Authors - Page 163

Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays. - Coco Chanel
Justine Picardie
Pantaloons were often worn tight as paint and were not a great deal less revealing, particularly as they were worn without underwear. . . . Jackets were tailored with tails in the back, but were cut away in front so that they perfectly framed the groin. It was the first time in history that men's apparel was consciously designed to be more sexy than women's.
Bill Bryson
Victorian rigidities were such that ladies were not even allowed to blow out candles in mixed company, as that required them to pucker their lips suggestively. They could not say that they were going "to bed"--that planted too stimulating an image--but merely that they were "retiring." It became effectively impossible to discuss clothing in even a clinical sense without resort to euphemisms. Trousers became "nether integuments" or simply "inexpressibles" and underwear was "linen." Women could refer among themselves to petticoats or, in hushed tones, stockings, but could mention almost nothing else that brushed bare flesh.
Bill Bryson
Skinny jeans were only good if you had skinny genes.
Matt Dunn
Can Flo come? She has so many clothes I really want her to get rid of.' I laugh. Flo's clothes are so funny. She buys one top and wears it every time we go out for six months, then buys another one and does the same. And the kinds of things she buys for school are boring. She gets things that look as close to school uniform as possible because she finds having to wear our own clothes every day so hard.
Dawn O'Porter
The late eighties was a good vintage. ID was not yet fashionable so a lot of people were doing it for the right reasons - to make good design, not become stars.
Leander Kahney
The fashion look of teens and twentysomethings -once so cutting edge- is now, like most of the music played on the radio, a matter of routine. Safe, tired, everywhere.
Phil Strongman
The happiness of being envied is glamour.Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
John Berger
Clamboring over building detritus was not the lifestyle Karl Lagerfeld had in mind for this sweet little powder-blue suit. As he oversaw the hand stitching in his atelier he had probably imagined the suit living a life of tea parties and lunches with the girls at the Ivy
Tyne O'Connell
The Duke is worried you lack the fitness to walk up Bond Street. You’re generation lacks the drive.
Tyne O'Connell
Chic rarely bothers to leave the Rue De Faubourg Saint-Honore.
Tyne O'Connell
Pleasantly bustling shoppers streamed past us on Bond Street - smart-suited men and well-heeled women whose commitment to luxury goods glazed over their eyes like a bad case of malaria.
Tyne O'Connell
Fashion and public relations share a charter to turn life to their own advantage, to make malleable and commercially useful the naked human perception. Both interests consider life too small, dull, and colorless to get itself sufficiently noticed without the lobbying efforts of professionals.
Kennedy Fraser
Oh! do look at Miss Oriel's bonnet the next time you see her. I cannot understand why it should be so, but I am sure of this—no English fingers could put together such a bonnet as that; and I am nearly sure that no French fingers could do it in England.
Anthony Trollope
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
George Meredith
Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and honestly charming again a few years later still is one of those things which are not satisfactorily to be explained and are therefore jolly and exciting and an addition to the perennial interest of life.
Margery Allingham
Yoga pants often answer questions I didn't ask.
Tim Heaton
London is speared by the tube map of fashion zone: zone one is classic-edgy, zone two is edgy-dowdy while the counties do a classic, edgy, dowdy hotch potch - epitomised so beautifully by Kate Moss.
Tyne O'Connell
I had walked all over the fragile bloom of his heart like a Boadicea in Blahniks
Tyne O'Connell
Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf.
George Eliot
Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.
Alexander McQueen
She first peered into its fascinating cases of beetles and butterflies at the age of six, in the company of her father. She recalls her pity at each occupant pinned for display. It was no great leap to draw the same conclusion of ladies: similarly bound and trussed, pinned and contained, with the objective of being admired, in all their gaudy beauty.
Emmanuelle de Maupassant
As long as you wear clothes you love, which suit your body and your personality, it won’t matter if you’re wearing a dress that was in vogue five years ago; you’ll still look amazing. Also, somebody has to START new trends, and that somebody could be you.
Rosie Blythe
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known byher shoes and her gloves.
Virginia Woolf
Normally, all I'm interested in is what the person has created. Hopefully they're not a mass murderer or mass rapist, but their personality is not important to me at that stage. They've got to be pretty extraordinary to make things like that anyway.
Isabella Blow
I'm not proud to admit I once owned a fringed cowgirl jacket.
Isabella Blow
Why Dont You?' wasn't totally absurd to me," Diana said later. "Of course, the columns had a certain absurdity that tickled people -- just to think that anyone would thin of writing anything so absurd. But it wasn't even writing. To me writing--Edith Wharton, Henry James...Proust, for God's sake...is a think of beauty and sustainment. 'Why Don't You?' was a think of fashion and fantasy, on the wing...It wasn't writing, it was just ideas. It was me, insistent on people using their imaginations, insisting on a certain idea of luxury.
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
In this instance, however, the answer was quite straightforward: "Men want women beautiful, romantic... birds of paradise instead of hurrying brown hens," said Bazaar in October 1945. As families were reestablished, there was a move toward a celebratory fashion of fecundity, with closer-fitting waists and rounder hips.
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
I am still not used to being the possessor of such a grand title. I believe I shall have to start wearing a purple satin turban and carrying a lorgnette.
Mary Balogh
There were no state regulations about hairstyles or clothes. It was what everyone else was wearing that determined the rules of the day. And because the range was so narrow, people were always looking out for the tiniest variations. It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to everyone else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical.
Jung Chang
This was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker's, the last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, living at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing.
Virginia Woolf
If I can’t garden in it, then I won’t wear it.
Fennel Hudson
If there was a dress that could make a fashion-appreciative girl out of me, this was it. The colors shimmered from gunmetal to pewter, reminding me of frost on the hedgerows where the light caught. The V of the neck decoratively dipped towards what Martha told me was an empty line, where organza, the color of stormy skies, fell all the way to the floor.
Anouska Knight
Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again. He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking Company," with two screens, a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw him an abandoned black overall or working dress on which to exercise the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in the "Arabian Nights." A pang too swift to be named pain or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier. He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence. At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working clothes.
G.K. Chesterton
Your own gown is most delicately suitable, both to the occasion and to yourself,' to be translated: Your gown is insipid and entirely forgettable. If you wear it on every other occasion this entire season, no one will notice or care.
Anne Perry
1) Leopardskin is always a neutral.2) You can get away with nearly anything if you wear the thing with black opaque tights and boots.3) Contrary to popular opinion, a belt is often not a good friend to a lady. Indeed, in many circumstances, it acts merely as a visual aid to help the onlooker settle the question: "Which half is fatter - the bottom or the top?"4) Bright red is a neutral.5) Sellotape is NOT strong enough to mend a hole in the crotch of a pair of tights.6) You should NOT buy an outfit if you have to strike a sexy pose in the changing-room mirror to make it look good. On the other hand, if you immediately start dancing the minute you put it on, buy it, however much it costs: unless it's lots, in which case, you can't, so don't. Fashion magazines will NEVER say, "Actually, don't buy it if you can't afford it." Neither will your friends. I am probably the only person who will EVER say it to you. You're welcome.
Caitlin Moran
Part of being a conscious human being, is having an intention. And if you put an intention into whatever you do, it’s definitely going to be more satisfying in the end
Daphne Guinness
It's not revealing, it's informative.
Gemma Burgess
Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.
Mary Quant
Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.
Bill Bryson
You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.
Elizabeth Bibesco
Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed.
Linda Grant
Fashion is never wrong.
Malcolm McLaren
The fashionable woman wears clothes. The clothes don't wear her.
Mary Quant
He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?
David Nicholls
Logos are the bleating of the insecure, desperate for acceptance by the chronically shallow.
Hadley Freeman
Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.
Quentin Bell
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which psychoanalysis is powerless to bestow.
Sebastian Horsley
I think in black.
Gareth Pugh
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.
Virginia Woolf
The most important thing to wear is a smile.
Ann Taylor
It's not a concert you are seeing, it's a fashion show.
Freddie Mercury
What I really love about them... is the fact that they contain someone's personal history...I find myself wondering about their lives. I can never look at a garment... without thinking about the woman who owned it. How old was she? Did she work? Was she married? Was she happy?... I look at these exquisite shoes, and I imagine the woman who owned them rising out of them or kissing someone...I look at a little hat like this, I lift up the veil, and I try to imagine the face beneath it... When you buy a piece of vintage clothing you're not just buying the fabric and thread - you're buying a piece of someone's past.
Isabel Wolff
I've no idea when I'm going to wear it, the girl replied calmly. I only knew that I had to have it. Once I tried it on, well... She shrugged. The dress claimed me.
Isabel Wolff
Buy less, choose well & do it yourself!
Vivienne Westwood
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E.M. Forster
You look... amazing!" And I have to say, I agree. I'm wearing all black - but expensive black. The kind of deep, soft black that you fall into. A simple sleeveless dress from Whistles, the highest of Jimmy Choos, a pair of stunning uncut amethyst earrings. And please don't ask how much it all cost, because that's irrelevant. This is investment shopping. The biggest investment of my life. I haven't eaten anything all day so I'm nice and thin and for once my hair has fallen perfectly into shape. I look... well, I've never looked better in my life.But of course, looks are only part of the package, aren't they?
Sophie Kinsella
Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp
And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government? The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.
G.K. Chesterton
Bow ties are cool.
Steven Moffat