Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Oliphant

Oliphant’s jab lands because it treats “fashion” as both trivial and tyrannical: a social script demanding obedience while pretending it’s merely taste. “Oh, never mind” is the key move. It’s dismissive, almost conversational, a door being closed on the endless monitoring of what’s current. Then she pivots to “style,” which in her framing isn’t just aesthetic preference but a claim to interior authority. Fashion is collective timekeeping; style is private citizenship.

The line’s slyness is in the arithmetic. “Twenty times better” isn’t meant as a measurable truth; it’s a comic overstatement that exposes how people quantify status through tiny visual cues. By exaggerating, she punctures the supposed seriousness of trends while still acknowledging their power. She’s not arguing that clothes don’t matter; she’s arguing that the chase for approval is a bad bargain.

Context matters: Oliphant wrote in a Victorian culture where women’s respectability was read off surfaces - dress, manners, restraint - and where the marketplace was beginning to industrialize desire. “Style of one’s own” hints at a limited but real form of self-determination in a world that policed female presentation. It’s also a novelist’s credo. Oliphant made a career out of observing how society rewards conformity and punishes deviation; here she offers a compact counter-strategy: cultivate an identity that can’t be updated out from under you.

The subtext is quietly radical: trends expire on schedule, but a self does not have to.