James Laver Quotations

During the summer, nearly every area of the country is normally subject to periods of extreme heat, wetness, or dryness. Summer weather patterns over the continental U.S. are more difficult to forecast than those in the winter season because they are not strongly tied to a climate indicator, such as an El Nino or La Nina.

The same dress is indecent ten years before its time; daring one year before its time; chic (contemporarily seductive) in its time; dowdy five years after its time; hideous twenty years after its time; amusing thirty years after its time; romantic one hundred years after its time; beautiful one hundred and fifty years after its time.

The same costume will be Indecent 10 years before its time, Shameless 5 years before its time, OutrT (daring) 1 year before its time, Smart, Dowdy 1 year after its time, Hideous 20 years after its time, Ridiculous 20 years after its time, Amusing 30 years after its time, Quaint 50 years after its time, Charming 70 years after its time, Romantic 100 years after its time, Beautiful 150 years after its time.

Avisitor from Mars contemplating a man in a frock coat and top hat and a woman in a crinoline might well have supposed that they belonged to different species.

If we could understand the full significance of a woman's hat we could prophesy her clothes for the next year, the interior decoration of the next two years, the architecture of the next ten years, and we would have a fairly accurate notion of the pressures, political, economic and religious that go to make the shape of an age.

When women take off their corsets and heighten their skirts it always means high inflation and low morals.

Nothing is more revealing of an age than its hypocrisies.

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.

Poor Englishwomen! When it comes to their clothes- well, the French reaction is a shrug, the Italian reaction a spreading of the hands and a lifting of the eyes and the American reaction simply one of amused contempt.

The erogenous zone is always shifting, and it is the business of fashion to pursue it, without ever catching it up.

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

The same costume will be Indecent ten years before its time, Shameless five years before its time, Outre (daring) one year before its time, Smart (in its own time), Dowdy one year after its time, Ridiculous twenty years after its time, Amusing thirty years after its time, Quaint fifty years after its time, Charming seventy years after its time, Romantic one-hundred years after its time, Beautiful one-hundred-and-fifty years after its time.

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.

Ten years before its time, a fashion is indecent; ten years after, it is hideous; but a century after, it is romantic.

Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something.