Anne Hollander, who died at 83 on Sunday, was an independent historian of style who wrote “Seeing Through Clothes” (1978), “Moving Pictures” (1989), “Sex and Suits” (1994) and “Feeding the Eye” (2000), all popular books about the cultural and psychological implications of what we wear. She also liked to connect clothing to art. Hollander spoke to WWD once, in a story by Francesca Stanfill that ran on December 4, 1978. Here are some of her provocative quotes.
“Everyone cares about clothes — that’s a favorite maxim of mine.”
“Visual need is what prompts the way clothes look — not primarily economic or practical factors.”
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“I DO believe that clothing is an art. The eye is full of lust for change and for certain changes of a certain time. There’s always an influx of practicality into fashion — all of a sudden, we must all wear blue jeans — but then people suffer from visual indigestion, and a surfeit of one type of thing brings us the delight in the opposite. But the appeal is constantly to the eye, I would say.”
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“In the 20th century, it is Chanel, of course, who has to be mentioned because of her personality thing. She was less important as a designer than as a public figure and of her ways of living and dressing for her style of life. And she TALKED about it. She was very vocal.”
On fashion: “We really do believe it’s wicked. We are a puritanical society, after all, and to be too interested in fashion shows that you’re weak-hearted and shallow.…The sense of the beautiful presentation of the self as part of one’s existence is hard to justify in the light of these ethics.…This is a particularly American phenomenon — Europe has gone past that long, long ago. Europe has always understood the importance of how clothes look.”
Rulers such as Catherine de Medici, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Elizabeth I “understood how to look as heads of state, and that clothes do not represent vanity, but a kind of propaganda.”
Hollander also addresses “dishevelment,” saying, “The persistent idea that it is more elegant to have your scarf undone, a curl coming down —that idea has its beginnings in the 17th-century mansions. Not as a result of fashion, but as a result of a languid style of life.” It means “lordly ease instead of bourgeois respectability. Instead of having every button and curl in place, the dukes and duchesses wanted to have a curl flowing. That’s been fairly persistent — that it’s more elegant to be slightly disheveled, after rather strict and buttoned-up periods.”