portmanteau blog

“Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?”

- Roland Barthes

“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

“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.”

- René König

“Fashion is only the attempt to realise art in living forms and social intercourse.”

 

- Sir Francis Bacon

“The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”

- Virginia Woolf

“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