Street Fashion Quotes & Sayings

I feel like I have become a living fossil in the fashion world. Without even noticing it, in my own collection I have moved away from the street style. — Yohji Yamamoto

I don't like the collusion between high fashion design and high street. You have to know where you stand. I belong to luxury fashion. That's what I've always felt and embraced. I like the best quality, the best fabrics and the most creative field in fashion. I will stay consistent. I belong to this world. — Hedi Slimane

I'm interested in seeing just the girl on the street because she is unlike any other. I'm inspired by whatever it is she might be wearing. — Anna Wintour

Many things have changed in our culture here in England as a direct result of the Pistols: the whole street-fashion thing in London, for example, or the coverage of popular culture in the national press, or the fact that the film industry is now about young people making films about young British issues. — Julien Temple

The Westway, the old strip club on Clarkson Street, is still there, but today it's owned by a hipster restaurant entrepreneur who caters to the ironic cultural lifestylers, more fashion world than art, people who are "cool" because they live in New York. — Kim Gordon

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein. — Quentin Crisp

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. — Henry James

The main thing I love about street photography is that you find the answers you don't see at the fashion shows. You find information for readers so they can visualize themselves. — Bill Cunningham

We are devastated to learn of the death of Alexander McQueen, one of the greatest talents of his generation. He brought a uniquely British sense of daring and aesthetic fearlessness to the global stage of fashion. In such a short career, Alexander McQueen's influence was astonishing - from street style, to music culture and the world's museums. His passing marks an insurmountable loss. — Anna Wintour

In a fashion similar to the leftist occupiers on Wall Street, their antics would be the target of rabid moral indignation on the front pages of the New York times and Washington Post and on the lead stories of every cable news show. — Jamie Glazov

The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture. — Chris Abani

What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could - and must - fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name - that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The street and me is a love story. 1971 is a great date because, finally, fashion took to the street. — Yves Saint-Laurent

Alexander Wang is a young designer, and his style is so profound. He took sports and street and kind of combined it into upscale high fashion. He made a white T-shirt a luxury. — ASAP Ferg

I know some people say that high fashion should not be worn at synagogue. I, on the other hand, think that it is of the utmost importance that the Goldbergs from down the street see you in the new Chanel Fall 2010 Yom Kippur line. — Rachel Zoe

I love New York, it's always been my home. It has everything - music, fashion, entertainment, impressive buildings, huge parks, street cafes. And it's very international, with people from all over the world. — Sean Combs

I'm a real Londoner. We have very grey weather in London, and I think it encourages a very eclectic and crazy fashion sense. I mix high-street stuff with more high-end fashion, and I love vintage. — Emma Watson

As the year goes on, certain deputies - and others, high in public life - will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours' manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke
to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.
While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just's cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker. — Hilary Mantel

London Fashion Week is so different from any of the others. Compared to the strictness in New York, London seems freer from commercial constraints. Truer to the process, to street style, to a sense of humour. — Alexa Chung

I find my dress sense tends to be a bit of a mixture between high fashion and unique vintage pieces with a little bit of street trends. For example, I might find a really nice, suede dinner jacket that I'd wear with a basic plain white shirt and some chinos and a pair of Nike trainers. — Tinie Tempah

The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. — Dave Barry

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. — Coco Chanel

I saw young women in the street dressing in a way that I thought was influencing the designers. Fashion was being influenced by all sorts of different people, and culture and also across the street. So I saw more as a trickle up, than a trickle down influence. When I came to Vogue, that's what I wanted it to reflect. — Anna Wintour

We circled around and came in from the northwest." I lifted my wrist to show him the compass on my watch band, although I hoped that, being the pilot, he knew we'd approached from the northwest. "I was looking out the window. I saw a woman running down the street. There was a pack of dogs after her and a guy with a switchblade down the street in the direction she was running."
"Ma'am," he said, still very patiently. I reached out and took a fistful of his shirt. Actually, at the last moment, I grabbed the air in front of his shirt. I didn't think security could throw me out of the airport for grabbing air in a threatening fashion, not even in this post-9/11 age.
"Don't ma'am me . . . — C.E. Murphy

If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable. — Beau Brummell

Living in New York, I get inspired by what young women are wearing - everything from high fashion to street fashion. — Austin Scarlett

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide. — John Greenleaf Whittier

I always try and mix High Street finds into my looks. It really doesn't matter how much something costs, it's the way you wear it! Fashion is about self expression, having fun, and occasionally being a little disposable. I really enjoy lots of stores that are found at local shopping malls. French Connection, Zara, and Topshop always interpret the fashions direct from the catwalk at affordable prices. This playsuit from Hoss Intropia is delicate, super sexy, and has a lingerie feel. I'd throw on a super soft, chunky cardigan and a pair of flat gladiator sandals. — Cat Deeley

The Duke is worried you lack the fitness to walk up Bond Street. You're generation lacks the drive. — Tyne O'Connell

Pleasantly bustling shoppers streamed past us on Bond Street - smart-suited men and well-heeled women whose commitment to luxury goods glazed over their eyes like a bad case of malaria. — Tyne O'Connell

High school is when I started to get my sense of fashion together. My queen was Candice Swanepoel, who is a friend of mine now, which is kind of funny, but in high school, I was obsessed. I love her street style: she is always in cool boyfriend jeans, boots, and an awesome coat, which is very much like what I wear. — Gigi Hadid

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

It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value. — Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time. — George Jean Nathan

We don't claim perfection; even the best journalism is but a first draft of history. But we bring to the challenge certain basic beliefs that aren't much in fashion these days. We believe facts are facts and that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting. We thus believe that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral. News, in short, is not merely a matter of views. And truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.
[Letter From the Publisher: A Report to The Wall Street Journal's Readers, 12 January, 1993] — Peter R. Kann

I hate fashion. Or the word fashion, which sounds colorful, extravagant, expensive and gorgeous. I never wanted to walk the main street of fashion. I have been walking the sidewalks of fashion from the beginning, so I'm a bit dark. — Yohji Yamamoto

We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could - and must - fashion the way of our walk. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I feel like I'm a trendsetter. I try to always stay on the edge of everything I do, whether it be music, fashion, film. I just like to stay abreast of what's going on. What's going on in the street and what's going on in the hood I put in my music and I feel like a lot of people follow that. — Gucci Mane

I'm going to be a fashion icon in a minute. I'm not going to do it in a corny manner. I have a voice that speaks for a whole other market - not just black people, but high fashion urban people. I mix street wear with high fashion. It's never been seen before. — ASAP Rocky

Why was that fore-carriage of a truck in that place in the street? In the first place, to encumber the street; next, in order that it might finish the process of rusting. There is a throng of institutions in the old social order, which one comes across in this fashion as one walks about outdoors, and which have no other reasons for existence than the above. — Victor Hugo

When I was going to Paris for Paris Fashion Week, I'd often walk down the street and go into all the different shops that we didn't necessarily have in the U.K., and Maje was definitely one of the ones that stood out for me. — Alexa Chung

I do not know who I am anymore. I though I was animal. I am no longer so sure. It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit too has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street pushing carts, you see them in the faces of regulars at a bar. My cocoon was that room. — Karen Marie Moning

Fashion is in the sky, in the street. — Coco Chanel

I love and admire everyone who is different. I love that. The 'jet set' is banal. 'Good taste' is banal. Eccentricity is chic. Good taste paralyzes. But punk or street fashion or a tattoo-covered body, that is interesting to me, and that I love. I didn't go to fashion school. I learned from watching couture shows on TV and reading magazines. That made me dream. — Jean Paul Gaultier

I like fashion to go down to the street, but I can't accept that it should originate there. — Coco Chanel

How do you stand out as a fashion ad campaign? By using people off the street; it does generate buzz. — Alber Elbaz

There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."--a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities. — Paula Rabinowitz

Debasement was limited at first to one's own territory. It was then found that one could do better by taking bad coins across the border of neighboring municipalities and exchanging them for good with ignorant common people, bringing back the good coins and debasing them again. More and more mints were established. Debasement accelerated in hyper-fashion until a halt was called after the subsidiary coins became practically worthless, and children played with them in the street, much as recounted in Leo Tolstoy's short story, Ivan the Fool. — Charles P. Kindleberger

I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bare. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at the bar. — Karen Marie Moning

When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,
not being inclined to change my dress,
to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe. — Henry David Thoreau

I try to destroy taboo in fashion-which is something I learned as a kid. I come from the street, and you have to be a survivor, — Riccardo Tisci

As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold. — Hari Kunzru

The best fashion show is definitely on the street. Always has been, and always will be. — Bill Cunningham

In India we're fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it's gone. Every person that's walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes are from, how much they cost, which designer made which shoe, which shop you bought each item from. Everything is civilized and tagged and valued and numbered and put in it's place. Whereas in India, the wilderness still exists-the unindoctrinated wilderness of the mind, full of untold secrets and wild imaginings. — Arundhati Roy

My uncle was the first brown person to have a market stall on Petticoat Lane in the 1960s. He worked his way up from the street. He was homeless, but eventually he got a car so he could sell from the boot. And by the 1980s, he was a millionaire wholesaling to companies like Topshop. So in a way, fashion put me in England. — M.I.A.

What Kate wore, whether on the street or the red carpet was much cooler to them than what she modelled. Her paparazzi photos were becoming indistinguishable from her editorials. — Maureen Callahan

We are talking about mutated women, the result of cruel genetic experiments performed by fashion designers so lacking in any sense of human decency that they think nothing of putting their initials on your eyeglass lenses. The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. If a normal woman puts on clothing designed for these unfortunate people, she is quite naturally going to look like Revenge of the Pork Person. — Dave Barry