James Laver Quotes

• Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something.

  James Laver

  Mean, Clothes, Clothing Style

  James Laver (1969). “Modesty in Dress: An Inquiry Into the Fundamentals of Fashion”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

  48 Copy quote

• Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic.

  James Laver

  Fashion, Years, Century

  43 Copy quote

• Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something, and that something is to a large extent outside the control of our conscious minds.

  James Laver

  Mean, Clothes, Mind

  James Laver (1969). “Modesty in Dress: An Inquiry Into the Fundamentals of Fashion”, Boston : Houghton Mifflin

  15 Copy quote

• Clothes are inevitable. They are nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible.

  James Laver

  Clothes, Mind, Furniture

  James Laver (1949). “Style in costume”

  21 Copy quote

• The same costume will be Indecent ten years before its time, Shameless five years before its time, Outre (daring) one year before its time, Smart (in its own time), Dowdy one year after its time, Ridiculous twenty years after its time, Amusing thirty years after its time, Quaint fifty years after its time, Charming seventy years after its time, Romantic one-hundred years after its time, Beautiful one-hundred-and-fifty years after its time.

  James Laver

  Beautiful, Smart, Years

  12 Copy quote

• When seen in retrospect, fashions seem to express their era. Although it is more difficult to draw conclusions from contemporary clothes, the same principles which hold for the clothes of the past must hold for clothes of the present and the future.

  James Laver

  Fashion, Past, Clothes

  11 Copy quote

• Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.

  James Laver

  Fashion, Class, Clothes

  10 Copy quote

• When women take off their corsets and heighten their skirts it always means high inflation and low morals.

  James Laver

  Women, Mean, Skirts

  11 Copy quote

• The erogenous zone is always shifting, and it is the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever catching it up.

  James Laver

  Fashion, Shifting, Catching

  James Laver (1969). “Modesty in dress: an inquiry into the fundamentals of fashion”

  8 Copy quote

• If we could understand the full significance of a woman's hat we could prophesy her clothes for the next year, the interior decoration of the next two years, the architecture of the next ten years, and we would have a fairly accurate notion of the pressures, political, economic and religious that go to make the shape of an age.

  James Laver

  Religious, Years, Two

  8 Copy quote

• Nothing is more revealing of an age than its hypocrisies.

  James Laver

  Hypocrisy, Age, Revealing

  8 Copy quote

• Avisitor from Mars contemplating a man in a frock coat and top hat and a woman in a crinoline might well have supposed that they belonged to different species.

  James Laver

  Men, Different, Mars

  1969 The Concise History of Costume and Fashion, ch.8.

  8 Copy quote

• Poor Englishwomen! When it comes to their clothes- well, the French reaction is a shrug, the Italian reaction a spreading of the hands and a lifting of the eyes and the American reaction simply one of amused contempt.

  James Laver

  Eye, Italian, Hands

  8 Copy quote

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