Lectures on fashion by Fran Lebowitz

I can't remember where I first had an encounter of the name Fran Lebowitz. Maybe I had, in one of those ELLE back issues I bought from Book Sale. 

ELLE U.S. on its website had an interview with the celebrated author. I can tell she's loud and can be surly. Or as we like to call it, opinionated -- like my favorite, the Queen of All Media of the seven thousand one hundred seven islands under the Republic of the Philippines, no less than Kris Aquino.

I love her for saying this:

They (Brooks Brothers) discontinued the shirt I liked. If I had only known this—I mean, if you're going to discontinue an item that thousands and thousands of people buy, announce it. Say, 'We will no longer be making our excellent Brooks Brothers cotton shirts that we made for 5,000 years. We're going to change them in some awful way. We're alerting you so you can buy a lifetime supply.' Shirts don't go bad, they're not peaches.

On real estate:

I wish that real estate were cheaper and clothes were more expensive. But that's what young people want: $2 T shirts that fall apart in the wash.

My middle-class budget is teary-eyed:

People care more about trends now than they do about style. They get so wrapped up in what's happening that they forget how to dress, and they never learn who they are because they never learn how to take care of anything. So much of what my generation was taught regarding clothes was how to make them last. How to wash and care for them.

Dry clean is an oxymoron:

I dry-clean as infrequently as possible—not only because it's psychotically expensive, but also because who knows what it does to the clothes? Dry…clean. These words don't go together. Wet clean—that is how you clean. I can't even imagine the things they do at the drycleaner. I don't want to know.

Ah, the phenomenon that is men wearing shorts:

To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? It's repulsive. They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously. It's like any other sort of revealing clothing, in that the people you'd most like to see them on aren't wearing them. And if they are, it's probably their job to wear them. My fashion advice, particularly to men wearing shorts: Ask yourself, 'Could I make a living modeling these shorts?' If the answer is no, then change your clothes. Put on a pair of pants.

I was entertained.