James Laver Quotes

#1. 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

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

James Laver

#3. Nothing is more revealing of an age than its hypocrisies.

James Laver

#4. 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

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

James Laver

#6. 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

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

James Laver

#8. Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something.

James Laver

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

James Laver