Beauty consists of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circum...stantial element, which will be, if you like, by turns or all together, the era, its fashion, its morals, its passions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania... assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value.... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescen...t hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But a dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down--very important traits in times l...ike these. In fact, just as soon as a dog comes along who, in addition to these qualities, also knows when to buy and sell stocks, he can be moved right up to the boy's bedroom and the boy can sleep in the dog house.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without F...erocity, and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery, if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just Tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only the minute and the future are interesting in fashion--it exists to be destroyed. If everybody did everything with respect, yo...u'd go nowhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only two animals have entered the human household otherwise than as prisoners and become domesticated by other means than those of... enforced servitude: the dog and the cat. Two things they have in common, namely, that both belong to the order of carnivores and both serve man in their capacity of hunters. In all other charac teristics, above all in the manner of their association with man, they are as different as the night from the day. There is no domestic animal which has so radically altered its whole way of living, indeed its whole sphere of interests, that has become domestic in so true a sense as the dog: and there is no animal that, in the course of its century-old association with man, has altered so little as the cat. There is some truth in the assertion that the cat, with the exception of a few luxury breeds, such as Angora, Persians, and Siamese, is no domestic animal but a completely wild being. Maintaining its full independence it has taken up its abode in the houses and outhouses of man, for the simple reason that there are more mice there than elsewhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits... of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »