Alison Lurie, the Pulitzer Prize - winning novelist, is our savvy guide and interpreter on this tour through the history of fashion, providing unique insights into how changing sex roles, political upheavals, and class structure have influenced costume. Whether she is describing the enormous amount of clothing worm by early Victorian women or illuminating the significance of the long robes worn throughout the centuries by again men to connote eminence, her analysis is playful, clever, and always on target.