As a member of a Cherokee delegation to Washington, DC, Sam Houston wore traditional loincloth and blanket to an 1818 meeting with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who was offended and chastised Houston for his dress. Twenty-two years later, between terms as president of the Republic of Texas, Houston wore such a blanket to meet Jean Pierre Isidore Alphonse Dubois, comte de Saligny, in Austin.

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.

A Japanese shogun in 1615 attempted to eradicate the popular fashions of the kabuki-mono, young men from the fringes of samurai communities who favored long hair with shaved foreheads and temples, large swords with showy red scabbards, imported velvet collars, and short kimonos with lead weights sewn into the hem. “Clothing should not be confusing,” stated a new samurai dress code.

After Mademoiselle Bertin became dressmaker to Marie Antoinette, “all wished instantly to have the same dress as the queen,” wrote lady-in-waiting Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan. “The expenditure of the younger ladies was necessarily much increased; mothers and husbands murmured at it; some few giddy women contracted debts; unpleasant domestic scenes occurred; several families either quarreled or grew cool among themselves; and the general report was that the queen would be the ruin of all the French ladies.”