It was my idea that if you started any kind of business, you should begin somewhere near where you hoped to end. In other words, if I wanted to make really good clothes to order, I would start out making good, and therefore expensive, clothes to order. If I started making inexpensive clothes, I thought probably I'd die making them.

Elizabeth Hawes

Categorized in : Ideas Order Fashion

Women want to wear what they do because of what goes on in their heads. Their size and shape have practically nothing to do with it.

Elizabeth Hawes

shapes goes-on want

It is impossible to be completely abstract about clothes because they have no life unless they are worn. They must fit onto a body or they do not exist.

Elizabeth Hawes

clothes body impossible

No garment which distorts the shape and motion of the wearer is beautiful, nor s any garment beautiful which emphasizes more than one or at most two of your sexual characteristics.

Elizabeth Hawes

shapes beautiful two

rule number one for all American women: You are to be seen and felt, but not heard. Listen and do as you are told and everything will be all right.

Elizabeth Hawes

american-woman heard numbers

being chic not only takes a great deal of money but an enormous amount of time. It practically precludes everything else, even being on charity committees. Half of one's time goes getting chic, the other half being seen that way.

Elizabeth Hawes

style fashion half

Chic is a combination of style and fashion.

Elizabeth Hawes

chic style fashion

There is no word in English for chic. Why should there be? Everything chic is by legend French. Perhaps everything chic is in reality French.

Elizabeth Hawes

style fashion reality

One of the most fascinating things about the world of fashion is that practically no one knows who inhabits it or why it exists. There are a few people who know how it works, but they won't tell.

Elizabeth Hawes

fashion people world

Fashion is that horrid little man with an evil eye who tells you that your last winter's coat may be in perfect physical condition, but you can't wear it. You can't wear it because it has a belt and this year 'we are not showing belts.

Elizabeth Hawes

fashion eye winter

Style doesn't change every month or every year. It only changes as often as there is a real change in the point of view and lives of the people for whom it is produced.

Elizabeth Hawes

fashion real views

After marriage, all things change. And one of them better be you.

Elizabeth Hawes

be-you things-change all-things

Is woman a lost sex? If so, is she the only lost sex? Has woman alone conceived all the vipers in our land?

Elizabeth Hawes

vipers land sex

If you feel like getting a divorce, you are no exception to the general rule.

Elizabeth Hawes

divorce exception feels

I don't know when the word fashion came into being, but it was an evil day. For thousands of years people got along with something called style and maybe, in another thousand, we'll go back to it.

Elizabeth Hawes

fashion people years

If you are the type who truly longs to be a Southern Belle at all times, regardless of taking twice the space available in bus, subway or elsewhere, you had best remove yourself to a large estate replete with servants.

Elizabeth Hawes

subway southern space

All one really requires for putting anything over is enough energy and resistance to keep on plugging the idea. Someone will eventually fall.

Elizabeth Hawes

energy ideas fall

There is a sound reason why one and a half billion dollars are spent for cosmetics in your country every year, and only half that sum for education: There are no naturally pretty girls in the United States.

Elizabeth Hawes

girl beauty country

If one is willing to have children, rhythm is probably the best method of contraception.

Elizabeth Hawes

method birth-control children

The process of education is not generally a process of teaching people to think and ask questions. It ... is mostly one of teaching the young what is and getting them into a mood where they will go on keeping it that way.

Elizabeth Hawes

change teaching thinking

Yesterday people were permitted to change things. They will be permitted to advocate changing them tomorrow. It is only dangerous to think of changing anything today.

Elizabeth Hawes

change yesterday thinking