“For the first time in my life I saw the ‘library’ public in the mass!” wrote Arnold Bennett after attending an H.G. Wells lecture in 1911. “It appeared to consist of a thousand women and Mr. Bernard Shaw. Women deemed to be elegant, women certainly deeming themselves to be elegant! I, being far back from the rostrum, had a good view of the backs of their blouses, chemisettes, and bodices. What an assortment of pretentious and ill-made toilettes!”

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.”

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.”

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.