Pronta e a uso, com o prazer que dá usar não o que se comprou numa loja mas o que se fez com cinco paus e três fios.
I just had a coat come home from the tailor’s. Ah me! Who am I that should wear this coat? It was fitted upon one of the devil’s angels about my size. Of what use that measuring of me if he did not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang it on. This is not the figure that I cut. This is the figure the tailor cuts. That presumptuous and impertinent fashion whispered in his ear, so that he heard no word of mine. As if I had said, ”Not my will, O Fashion, but thine be done.”
Do diário de Henry David Thoreau, a 14 de Janeiro de 1854.
Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; on the contrary, it’s a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly, the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don’t express me; and heaven forbid the should!’
‘You dress very well,’ interposed Madame Merle, skillfully.
‘Possibly, but I don’t care to be judged by that. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don’t express me. To begin with, it’s not my own choice that I wear them; they are imposed upon me by society.’
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881.
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