James Laver Quotes

Clothes are never a frivolity: they always mean something.

— James Laver

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

— James Laver

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

— James Laver

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.

— James Laver

“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.”

— James Laver

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

— James Laver

“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.”

— James Laver

“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.”

— James Laver

“Nothing is more revealing of an age than its hypocrisies.”

— James Laver

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

— James Laver

“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.”

— James Laver

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.

— James Laver