Obsessed by Dress

Are you obsessed by dress? Do you wonder if your obsession is a virtue or a vice? The flourish of a creative spirit or a sign of conformity to social norms? If so, you're in good company. Juxtaposing quotations from Virgil to Coco Chanel, Tobi Tobias reassures us that the obsession with clothes is as old as human history itself.

Jane Austen, Mae West, Christian Dior, Virginia Woolf, Andy Warhol, and Mark Twain are among the many who have their say. Arranged with incomparable flair, their comments will help you answer the eternally vexing question, "What shall I wear?" "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art." -Oscar Wilde

"Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim." --Jane Austen

"Show me the clothes of a country and I can write its history." --Anatole France

"Only God helps the badly dressed." --Spanish proverb

"Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in fell a trifle short of the wearer's expectation." --Charles Dickens

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." --Henry David Thoreau

"Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat." --Sydney J. Harris

"Brevity is the soul of lingerie." --Dorothy Parker

"There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking." --Virginia Woolf