"Fashion is so close in revealing a person's inner feelings and everybody seems to hate to lay claim to vanity so people tend to push it away. It's really too close to the quick of the soul"
About this Quote
Fashion, in Stella Blum's framing, isn't the frivolous surface we pretend it is; it's a diagnostic. The sting in her line comes from how neatly it corners us: clothing sits at the intersection of choice and exposure, personal taste and public performance. If style can "reveal a person's inner feelings", then getting dressed becomes less about trend and more about confession, made in full daylight.
Blum's sharpest move is naming the cultural dodge. "Everybody seems to hate to lay claim to vanity" points to a social etiquette where desire must disguise itself as practicality, where caring is suspect unless it can be laundered into "professionalism" or "comfort". The subtext is that we don't reject fashion because it's meaningless; we reject it because it threatens the story we tell about ourselves as rational, morally serious people. Vanity is treated as a character flaw, so we pretend our aesthetics are accidental.
"Too close to the quick of the soul" is an old-fashioned phrase with a modern psychological bite. She isn't romanticizing clothes; she's arguing that they sit near the nerve endings of identity: class aspiration, gender expression, insecurity, eroticism, belonging. Fashion becomes a sanctioned way to signal what we can't say outright, which is exactly why it's policed, mocked, and endlessly moralized.
In context, Blum reads like someone pushing back against the mid-century habit of relegating fashion to the feminine and the trivial. She insists it's intimate evidence - and our discomfort is the proof.
Blum's sharpest move is naming the cultural dodge. "Everybody seems to hate to lay claim to vanity" points to a social etiquette where desire must disguise itself as practicality, where caring is suspect unless it can be laundered into "professionalism" or "comfort". The subtext is that we don't reject fashion because it's meaningless; we reject it because it threatens the story we tell about ourselves as rational, morally serious people. Vanity is treated as a character flaw, so we pretend our aesthetics are accidental.
"Too close to the quick of the soul" is an old-fashioned phrase with a modern psychological bite. She isn't romanticizing clothes; she's arguing that they sit near the nerve endings of identity: class aspiration, gender expression, insecurity, eroticism, belonging. Fashion becomes a sanctioned way to signal what we can't say outright, which is exactly why it's policed, mocked, and endlessly moralized.
In context, Blum reads like someone pushing back against the mid-century habit of relegating fashion to the feminine and the trivial. She insists it's intimate evidence - and our discomfort is the proof.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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