A Spanish gallant in the sixteenth century who followed the contemporary fashion of padding his trunk-hose with quantities of bran was surprised to learn while entertaining ladies that a nail on his chair had opened a hole in his hose, and bran had started trickling out. The ladies laughed. He continued, encouraged, but bran soon was pouring forth. The ladies’ laughter increased. Finally, the gallant noticed the bran, bowed, and left in shame.

In 1876 Dr. Gustav Jaeger, zoologist and physiologist at the University of Stuttgart, began advocating the wearing of rough animal fibers, particularly undyed sheep wool, close to the skin; early customers of his “Sanitary Woollen System” included Oscar Wilde and Henry Stanley, who brought them on his expedition to Africa to search for Dr. Livingstone.

In 1999 an Inuit organization complained that representatives from Donna Karan International had come to the Canadian Arctic and paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for handmade Inuit clothing. “They went to the bar up in Yellowknife,” the group told the Ottawa Citizen, “and people just sold them their clothes.” Items purchased later appeared in Donna Karan’s Madison Avenue store.

In 1993 Estelle Ellis, Seventeen magazine’s first promotion director, gave a speech at the Fashion Institute of Technology titled “What Is Fashion?” Ellis gave her answer. Fashion is a perpetual-motion machine expressed in four areas: “mode—the way we dress; manners—the way we express ourselves; mores—the way we live; and markets—the way we are defined demographically and psychologically.”