Category Archive: Fashion
False Modesty
“Her eyebrows from a mouse’s hide, Stuck on with art on either side, Pulls off with care, and first displays ’em, Then in a play-book smoothly lays ’em.” So wrote Jonathan Swift, commemorating the 18th century’s false-eyebrow trend in his…
Tulipomania
The tulips are blooming everywhere. You probably know something about the legendary obsession with tulips in old Holland and Flanders, a flowery fad based on bulb-price speculation that briefly drove the local economy in the mid-17th century—until the market crashed….
The Baltimore Bonaparte
It was a dress so small that it “would fit easily into a gentleman’s pocket.” Elizabeth Patterson (1785-1879) was one of the daring young women who imported France’s scandalous Grecian-inspired (Empire) dresses to the United States in the early 19th…
M. & Mme. Pink
When I first started working in fashion, I couldn’t spell the word fuchsia for the life of me. Even with spell check. Even with a dictionary. That is, until one lucky day when a gruff senior editor at WWD explained…
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