fashion
Pink is the navy blue of India.
D. V. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997), paperback edition, 106.
People wouldn’t know this about me, but I adore ball gowns. I love their cut, their architecture and the thought of the hands of so many seamstresses working on them.
“A Rare Spirit, a Rarer Eye,” by Ruth La Ferla, The New York Times, March 19, 2010.
I wear black because I’m comfortable in it. But then in the summertime when it’s hot I’m comfortable in light blue.
Larry King Live, CNN, November 26, 2002.
Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
Farewell, My Lady, First Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition (New York: Random House, 1992), 4.
She is forty-five and austerely handsome, with large eyes the color of coal and a wide, upturned mouth that often gives her a wry expression. She wears sneakers, black trousers, a wool cardigan with elbow patches—the indifferent wardrobe of someone who devotes her energy to looking rather than to being seen.
“Celluloid Hero: Tacita Dean’s exhilirating homage to film,” by Emily Eakin, New Yorker, October 31, 2011, 54.
I love dresses, especially good vintage from the early ’70s–Yves Saint Laurent and Ossie Clark, and anything in silk, printed crepe, or chiffon. I love polka dots, peplums, cap sleeves, tea lengths, cloth-covered buttons, high heels, and wide belts. Everything I buy has to have a waist that fits; that’s the only design element about which I’m completely inflexible.
“Joanna Newsom,” interviewed by Roy Harper, BOMB magazine, Issue 116, Summer 2011.
He had never seen a woman who wore her clothes with such apparent joy. And the clothes themselves looked as if, in being draped on her body, they had won new life for themselves.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (New York: Vintage, 2007), 192.
I’m not somebody who likes to possess. I’m not the person who has six hundred suits. I want to have two suits. Actually, I want to have one suit, and I replace it.
“Just Have Less: Bottega Veneta’s Tomas Maier,” by John Colapinto, The New Yorker, January 3, 2011, 34.
I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles.”
“Standing By,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 33–35.