Fashion Quotes

A quote has a few meanings. It can be an estimated price for a job or service, and it can mean a group of words taken from a text or a speech. Both meanings matter in fashion: the business runs on price quotes, and the culture runs on quotable sayings — a designer often designs an entire collection around particular fashion price points, while a single sentence from Oscar Wilde still opens fashion articles more than a century later.

Price Quotes: The Business Meaning

Price quotes are important because the business of fashion requires the buying and selling of goods and services, and nearly every aspect of it has pricing and payments attached. The apparel industry weighs the cost of cotton, polyester pricing, shipping rates, fabric prices and garment pricing before a collection exists; designers design around fashion price points — budget, discount, moderate, contemporary, bridge — that decide in advance what a garment may cost to make and to sell.

Consumers meet the same meaning at the till: the purchase price often affects buying decisions, and a quote for a service — alterations, repairs, bespoke work — is the fashion transaction in its simplest form. The cost of cotton and price point pages linked here track the numbers behind this meaning.

Sayings: The Cultural Meaning

Fashion quotes from text, movies, music and public speaking can be interesting, thoughtful and motivating. Oscar Wilde supplied the most durable: fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. Alber Elbaz countered that style is the only thing you cannot buy — not in a shopping bag, a label or a price tag, but reflected from the soul to the outside world. Gianni Versace advised: do not be into trends; do not make fashion own you; decide what you are and what you want to express by the way you dress.

Bette Midler firmly believed that with the right footwear one can rule the world; Alexander McQueen saw beauty in things normal people perceive as ugly; Ralph Lauren said he does not design clothes, he designs dreams; and Hubert de Givenchy left construction's best rule — the dress must follow the body of a woman, not the body following the shape of the dress. Song lyrics supply further quotes, as the fashion lyrics summary linked here shows, with fashion documentaries, podcasts and books — all linked from this page — as the longer forms worth quoting at length.

Collecting Quotes That Earn Their Place

A good fashion quote survives because it compresses experience. Wilde's six months is the industry's production calendar stated as a witticism; Givenchy's rule is a fitting lesson in one sentence; Versace's advice is a whole philosophy of dressing in three clauses. The weak quotes — compliments to shopping in general — fade because they teach nothing. Readers building their own collections, for speeches, essays or studio walls, should apply the working test: a quote earns its place if remembering it changes a decision.