"It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned"
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Modernity loves to cosplay as permanence, and Wilde punctures that vanity with a single, elegantly barbed sentence. “It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned” flips the usual timeline: we assume “old-fashioned” is what survives from the past, but Wilde argues it’s what once bragged about being new. The punchline lands because it treats modernity not as progress but as a marketing claim with an expiration date.
Wilde’s intent is classic aestheticist sabotage. In a culture drunk on Victorian innovation and bourgeois self-improvement, “modern” had become a moral badge: the right furniture, the right opinions, the right seriousness. Wilde makes “modern” sound faddish, not enlightened. The subtext: the more anxiously you announce your up-to-dateness, the more you guarantee your future embarrassment. True style, by contrast, can’t be timestamped; it either holds or it doesn’t.
The line also smuggles in a defense of art’s resistance to utility. Wilde spent his career arguing that art shouldn’t be judged by contemporary usefulness or moral fashion. Here, “old-fashioned” becomes the graveyard of once-fashionable certainties: yesterday’s radical realism, last decade’s “advanced” tastes, today’s earnest postures. He’s warning that modernity isn’t a destination; it’s a treadmill.
Context matters: late-19th-century London was a showroom of progress and propriety, and Wilde made a sport of revealing how quickly public virtue curdles into decor. The aphorism works because it flatters no one: if you’re proud to be modern, you’re already scheduling your own obsolescence.
Wilde’s intent is classic aestheticist sabotage. In a culture drunk on Victorian innovation and bourgeois self-improvement, “modern” had become a moral badge: the right furniture, the right opinions, the right seriousness. Wilde makes “modern” sound faddish, not enlightened. The subtext: the more anxiously you announce your up-to-dateness, the more you guarantee your future embarrassment. True style, by contrast, can’t be timestamped; it either holds or it doesn’t.
The line also smuggles in a defense of art’s resistance to utility. Wilde spent his career arguing that art shouldn’t be judged by contemporary usefulness or moral fashion. Here, “old-fashioned” becomes the graveyard of once-fashionable certainties: yesterday’s radical realism, last decade’s “advanced” tastes, today’s earnest postures. He’s warning that modernity isn’t a destination; it’s a treadmill.
Context matters: late-19th-century London was a showroom of progress and propriety, and Wilde made a sport of revealing how quickly public virtue curdles into decor. The aphorism works because it flatters no one: if you’re proud to be modern, you’re already scheduling your own obsolescence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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