James Laver Clothes Quotations

Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.

Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something, and that something is to a large extent outside the control of our conscious minds.

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.

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

Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something.