A king in twelfth-century-bc China enjoyed women wearing dangling pearls and jade in a “Hair-knot Which Sways at Every Step”; the emperor who built the Great Wall favored the “Hair-knot Which Rises Above the Clouds”; Tang women wore the “Hair-knot of the Homing Bird”; and a writer in the last years of the Manchu dynasty offered the name “Hair-knot of Disintegration and Homeless Wandering” for a style of the day. “The times are indeed out of joint!” he wrote. “I tremble to think of what is to come.”

Japanese athletic-footwear company Onitsuka Tiger changed its name in 1977 to ASICS, an acronym of the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, “a sound soul in a sound body,” altering a line from one of Juvenal’s satires. “If you must pray for something,” wrote the poet, “then ask for a sound mind in a sound body.”

The wardrobe that accompanied Tutankhamen to the afterlife included ninety sandals, four socks, 145 loincloths with thread counts of two hundred, and a fake leopard skin made of linen with sewn-on spots.

Southern women during the Civil War chewed on newspapers, believing an ingredient in the ink whitened their faces.