During our twenties...we act toward the new adulthood the way sociologists tell us new waves of immigrants acted on becoming Ameri...cans: we adopt the host culture's values in an exaggerated and rigid fashion until we can rethink them and make them our own. Our idea of what adults are and what we're supposed to be is composed of outdated childhood concepts brought forward.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to be...d and sleep quiet afterward. All his prayers begin with "Now I lay me down to sleep," and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his "long rest." He has consented to perform certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of any new-fangled ones; he does n't wish to have any supplementary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the present time. He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit as well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
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 »
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 »
The obvious self-satisfaction of the individual with his own form stimulates imitation and gradually produces the form of the many...--that is, fashion. Through fashion, the many strive towards and even achieve that very same comforting self-satisfaction with their form.--When you consider how many reasons each person has for anxiety and timid self-concealment, and how three-quarters of his energy and goodwill can be paralyzed and rendered fruitless by these reasons, you have to be very grateful to fashion to the extent that it sets that three-quarters free and communicates self-confidence and a mutual and cheerful cooperation to those who realize that they are all bound by its law. Even foolish laws confer freedom and emotional tranquility so long as enough people submit to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »