The Language of Fashion Quotes

“Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?”
― Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion

“Cleanliness (hygiene), the most important of American values (at least mythically), is counteracted in spectacular fashion: dirt on the body, in the hair, on the clothes; clothes dragging along the street, dusty feet, fair-haired babies playing in the gutter (but somehow it is still different from real dirtiness, different from a long-engrained poverty, from a dirtiness which deforms the body, the hand; hippy dirt is different, it has been borrowed for the holidays, sprinkled over like dust, and, like a footprint, not permanent).”
― Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion

“As Fashion is a phenomenon of initiation, its wording naturally plays a didactic role: the Fashion text represents in some way the authoritative wording of someone who knows everything that is behind the confused, or incomplete, appearance of the visible forms; this wording therefore constitutes the moment when what is hidden becomes visible, in which one can almost see, in a secularized form, the sacred halo of divinatory texts; all the more since the knowledge of Fashion never comes without a price; it holds a sanction for those who are excluded from it: the stigma of being unfashionable.”
― Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion

“Dandyism […] is not only an ethos (on which much has been written since Baudelaire and Barbey) but also a technique. It is these two together which make a dandy, and it is obviously the latter which guarantees the former, as with all ascetic philosophies (of the Hindu type, for example) in which a physical form of behaviour acts as a route towards the performance of thought […]”
― Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion

“[…] printed fashion functions, semiologically speaking, like a true mythology of clothing: it is even because the vestimentary signified is here objectified, thickened, that fashion is mythic. So it is this mythology of clothing (one could also say its utopia) that needs to be the first stage of a vestimentary linguistics.”
― Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion