Curmudgeon Fashion
collected by
Jon Winokur

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable
that we have to alter it every six months.
-- OSCAR WILDE

Fashion is what you adopt
when you don't know who you are.
-- QUENTIN CRISP

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving
that epidemics can be produced by tradesmen.
-- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Clothes make the man. Naked people have
little or no influence on society.
-- MARK TWAIN

Dressing is a matter of taste, and I've
met very few Republicans with good taste.
-- WILLIE BROWN

If men can run the world, why can't they
stop wearing neckties? How intelligent
is it to start the day by tying a little
noose around your neck?
-- LINDA ELLERBEE

Men who wear turtlenecks look like turtles.
-- DORIS LILLY

A hat should be taken off when you greet a
lady and left off for the rest of your life.
Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
-- P.J. O'ROURKE

All women's dresses, in every age and
country, are merely variations on the
eternal struggle between the admitted
desire to dress and the unadmitted
desire to undress.
-- LIN YUTANG

A woman's dress should be like a
barbed wire fence: serving its purpose
without obstructing the view.
-- SOPHIA LOREN

Violet will be a good color for hair at
just about the same time that brunette
becomes a good color for flowers.
-- FRAN LEBOWITZ

The leading cause of death among fashion
models is falling through street grates.
-- DAVE BARRY

I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.
-- GILDA RADNER

Once you accept the universe as matter
expanding into nothing that is something,
wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.
-- ALBERT EINSTEIN

Never wear anything that panics the cat.
-- PJ. O'ROURKE

What a deformed thief this fashion is.
-- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Fashion is something barbarous, for it
produces innovation without reason and
imitation without benefit.
-- GEORGE SANTAYANA

The idea behind the tuxedo is the woman's
point of view that men are all the same, so
we might as well dress them that way. That's
why a wedding is like the joining together
of a beautiful, glowing bride and some guy.
The tuxedo is a wedding safety device,
created by women, because they know that men
are undependable. So in case the groom
chickens out, everybody just takes one step
over, and she marries the next guy.
-- JERRY SEINFELD

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the
industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.
-- NICOLAS CHAMFORT

Never despise fashion. It's what we have instead of God.
-- MALCOLM BRADRURY

Being a well-dressed man is a career, and he who
goes in for it has no time for anything else.
-- HEYWOOD BROUN

When people are free to do as they please,
they usually imitate each other.
-- ERIC HOFFER