Twain's Thoughts on Fashion

In his novels and notebooks, lectures and letters, Mark Twain commented on the fashion of his times or described the clothing of his contemporaries and characters. Here is a sampling of his thoughts:

• Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born.
  Mark Twain, a Biography
• Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.
  More Maxims of Mark
• Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.
  Mark Twain's Notebook
• Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress; and some would lose all of it.
  "Woman, God Bless Her" speech
• I like the (Oxford) degree well enough, but I'm crazy for the clothes.
• Their costumes, as to architecture, were the latest fashion intensified; they were rainbow-hued; they were hung with jewels--chiefly diamonds. It would have been plain to any eye that it had cost something to upholster these women.
  The Gilded Age
• What can be more depressing than the somber black which custom requires men to wear upon state occasions? A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is just about as inspiring.
  Mark Twain's Speeches
• No woman can look as well out of fashion as in it.
  Mark Twain at Your Fingertips
• Magnanimous Florence! Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in mosaic.Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world.
  The Innocents Abroad
• I never knowed how clothes could change a body before.
  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• In the winter-the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter, when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten our spirits and lift them up-we all conform to the prevailing insanity, and go about in dreary black.
  Mark Twain's Own Autobiography
• Writing fashion articles, like wet nursing, can only be done properly by women.
  The Works of Mark Twain: Early Sketches and Tales
• When you are seventy-one years old you may at least be pardoned for dressing as you please.
  Twain Quoted in New York Tribune, Dec. 8,. 1906
• Taken as a class, women can contrive more outlandish and ugly costumes than one would think possible without the gift of inspiration.
  - Letter to Alta California, February 7, 1867
• The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.
  - Following the Equator