What Is Fashion?

A question that I get asked a lot is, “What is fashion to you?” And before I answer this question, I wanted to present different answers by other great thinkers.

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to change it every six months.” – Oscar Wilde

“Fashion condemns us to many follies; the greatest is to make ourselves its slave.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.“ – Coco Chanel

“Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” – Quentin Crisp

“Don’t you know that you are working at the place that published some of the greatest artists of the century? Halston, Lagerfeld, de la Renta. And what they did, what they created was greater than art because you live your life in it.” – Nigel, The Devil Wears Prada

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.” – Jean Cocteau

“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.” – George Santayana

“Fashion is more usually a gentle progression of revisited ideas.” – Bruce Oldfield

“Fashion is so close in revealing a person’s inner feelings and everybody seems to hate to lay claim to vanity so people tend to push it away. It’s really too close to the quick of the soul.” – Stella Blum

“Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.” – Golda Meir

“Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.” – Sir Francis Bacon

“What a deformed thief fashion is.” – William Shakespeare

“Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos.”- Rene Konig

“Fashion anticipates, and elegance is a state of mind … a mirror of the time in which we live, a translation of the future, and should never be static.” – Oleg Cassini

What is fashion to you? Is it another essential to life? Is it art? Is it a social trap? Leave your ideas below!