Quotes & Sayings About Black And White Fashion

Hey dawg, wassup? he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment. — Craig Ferguson

Leather pants are my guilty fashion pleasure. I have at least 10 pairs in navy, red, white, dusty pink, grey, suede and black. — Abbey Clancy

The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its lobby, for one thing, was little more than a wide corridor, with two drably upholstered wing chairs propped against a wall and, between them, a glass table upon which rested an elaborate but unaesthetic arrangement of silk flowers. The light in the corridor was greenish, dim and lavatorial, barely illuminating the shallowly carved figures that marched, in pseudo-Egyptian fashion, along the pink stone tiles as far as the elevator. The floor, incongruously, was of a black and white parquet, upon which all but the softest slippers echoed ominously. And the elevator itself - paneled, with brass fixtures and a single tiny red velvet stool, presumably for its operator's comfort - seemed again of a different, though no less ancient, era. — Claire Messud

Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony. — Coco Chanel

One of the things I noticed when I worked at Vibe was that backstage at a fashion show, they always referred to the black models as "black girls." I thought, "They never say 'white girls.'. — Hilton Als

CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.
What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She's a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult. — William Gibson

Chanel is composed of only a few elements, white camellias, quilted bags and Austrian doorman's jackets, pearls, chains, shoes with black toes. I use these elements like notes to play with. — Karl Lagerfeld

In July 1964 an alleged incident involving Paco Rabanne rocked the
model community to its foundations. The innovative Spanish-born designer
had used black beauties in his Paris show to model his futuristic
plastic dresses, a move that enraged the American fashion press. According
to Rabanne in Barbara Summers's book Skin Deep, things got
out of hand backstage after the show. 'I watched them coming,' he said,
'the girls from American Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. "Why did you do
that?" they said. "You don't have the right to do that, to take those kind
of girls. Fashion is for us, white people." They spat in my face. I had to
wipe it off.' Rabanne was subsequently blacklisted by the fashion cartels
until black runway models finally became chic in the 1970s. — Ben Arogundade

My fashion icons are Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner. Their classic looks and clean lines should be the cornerstones of your wardrobe - white cotton shirts, black Capri pants, pencil skirts and ballerina skirts. — Marie Helvin

Coco Chanel used to talk about wearing more than one string of pearls. Why wear one if you can wear two, or something to that effect. I think that one string of pearls is just fine. But that's because my pearls are black, hers were white. — C. JoyBell C.

Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps. — Tiger Woods

I have to admit that I'm up to my neck in frivolity, buried in dresses to the point of ruin! Fifteen different garments! My wardrobe jam-packed! My girl, this is not the way for an old woman to behave - particularly since you never wear anything but black and white, or a little grey, so that you always look as though you were in the same dress. Why fritter away your money so absurdly? (22 August 1919) — Liane De Pougy

Fashion is constantly changing from decade to decade, but I don't see a change in how many black faces I see on the runway, and it's something we should talk about because it's a problem. — Jessica White

Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it ... Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves. — Bell Hooks

Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are? — Ahmir Questlove Thompson