2012-02-13 ~ Mark

So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Susan Sontag. Via a commenter on today’s Cat and Girl.

2011-02-03 ~ Mark

Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.

Daniel Mendelsohn. (via a previous version of myself)

Permanent style: When style becomes costume

2010-10-12 ~ Mark

Men who are very interested in their clothes are part geeky, petty academic and part creative, artistic aesthete. Everyone needs the former to drive them into reading and investigation, to be interested by the history and traditions of men’s attire. But everyone also needs the latter, to have the kind of mind that created these traditions in the first place.

Of course, this applies to more than just fashion.