I am the most ardent fashion-maker who ever lived. I make them inside me and outside. Past and present can mingle with odd styles in me. And as the metamorphosis continues in my flesh wonderful things happen to my senses. It's as though I sensed everything close-up. I have extremely acute style and taste, plus a sense of décor extraordinarily discriminating. I can detect and identify outfits at three parts per million. I know. I have tested it. You cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what I can detect by outfits alone. Your clothes tell me what you are doing or are prepared to do. And gesture and posture! I stared for half a day once at an old man sitting on a bench in Arrakeen. He was wearing a fifth-generation knockoff of Stilgar the Naib's Fall Lineup and did not even know it. I studied the angle of its threading, the collar flaps below his chin, the cracked cuffs and wear about the wrists, the tuck near his waist, the wisps of gray hair which crept from beneath the hood of his faint imitation. Not once did he detect that he was being watched. Hah! Stilgar would have known it in a second or two. But this old man was just waiting for someone who never came. He got up finally and tottered off. He was very stiff after all of that sitting. I knew I would never see him in that outfit again. It was that near out of style and its tailoring was sure to be wasted. Well, that no longer mattered.

-The Stolen Wardrobe


You must remember that I have at my internal demand every expertise known to our history. This is the fund of energy I draw upon when I address the mentality of fashion. If you have not heard the moaning cries of the tasteless and the ugly, you do not know about fashion. I have heard those cries in such numbers that they haunt me. I have cried out myself in the aftermath of critique. I have suffered wounds in every epoch—wounds from shirt and suit and vest, from gem-studded sleeves and bronze jewels, from the jeans and the runway, from skirts and stocking and the silent flapping of long capes, from stylistic invasions which silence the tongue and empty the lungs, from the swift damage of scrapes and the silent working of slow repairs...and more I will not recount! I have seen and felt them all. To those who dare ask why I behave as I do, I say: With my memories, I can do nothing else. I am not a coward and once I was human.

-The Stolen Wardrobe


Style strengthen you.
Plainness weaken.
I tell you this in the hope that it will help you understand why I act as I do in the full knowledge that great forces accumulate in my Bureau with but one wish—the wish to destroy me. You who read these words may know full well what actually happened, but I doubt that you understand it.

-The Stolen Wardrobe



I know the evil of my style because I am those outfits. The balance is delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your style this way. It has not occurred to you that your outfits were fashionable and that the fashion itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton dress which unenlightened humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your won banality?

-The Stolen Wardrobe