Style: it’s what everyone wants, and a decent amount of lucky people actually have. But who is the best teacher for understanding the delicate balance of fashion and style? An expert, of course. Instead of taking it from your best friend or a magazine article, why not pay attention to what some of the experts have to say about style? After all, those experts can talk the talk and walk the walk and they more than anyone else understand what it’s like to have everyone looking at you.
No list of quotes on fashion would be complete without the reigning queen of it all, Coco Chanel. Practically the most powerful woman to ever exist in couture, Chanel understood what it meant to work hard, and also understand what it was that made a woman beautiful. She also always had something to say about style, like this famous and often-repeated quote: “A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.”
One of fashion’s heavyweights, Christian Dior is always creating a collection that has jaws dropping regardless the year or season. Famous quote: “Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.”
Part model, part musician, part actress, Grace Jones was one of the seminal figures of the 1970s downtown New York scene. Her influence in the modeling world is still felt, and she was one of the few performers who did a truly decadent job of dressing herself: “Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.”
Proving that one’s not born a woman but rather, becomes one, RuPaul has been setting the bar for her own unique brand of fashion since the 1990s. Still kicking, her incredibly witty insight on the world at large is worth repeating, and her search for the next best drag queen netted tons of viewers recently. One notable quote of hers: “With hair, heels, and attitude, honey, I am through the roof.”
Once a fixture of the explosive after-hours seen in 1980s London, Simon Foxton still lives and works as a stylist today. He was one of the first stylists of the 1980s to make it from the club flyers to the glossy magazines of Milan and New York. Famous quote: “For the last three or four decades it has been the streets [setting trends], and maybe now it’s gone back to the designers again and they’re the ones who are coming up with the goods and setting the trends.”
Not necessarily a fashion icon of our time, the wit and wisdom of writer Oscar Wilde has inspired many a fashion designer with an interest in biting satire and foppish dandyness: “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
When it comes to timeless fashion, it doesn’t get more pertinent than Aldo Gucci: “The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low prices has faded away.
Jayde Johannsen loves analyzing fashion. This is why she launched the Women’s Shoes website. It has a page on all the important shoe types, including women’s dress shoes