or as my old friend O.D. used to put it, "Duds make the dude".

Good points. There has always been fashion of a sort, You read in historical accounts of hipsters dressing in "the French style", or Italian fashion", and we can see costume changing throughout Europe in book illustrations and art. Look at a collection of US currency, the dead Presidents morph from clean shaven with long hair (or wigs) to short hair and beards and mutton chops and burnsides, to the modern pansy short haircut with no facial hair. Who was the last president with a moustache? Teddy Roosevelt? Who was the last one to run for President with a moustache? Thomas Dewey? The three-cornered hat gave way to the stovepipe in one generation, which gave way to the snap-brim (now erroneously called the fedora). Check out Jimmy Carter's presidential haircut, spinnaker neckties, flared trousers and wide-lapel suits. its right out of a disco!

Brit soldiers made fun of their American opponents by singing
"[Yankee Doodle] put a feather in his hat and called it macaroni." They were hinting their country bumpkin enemies had no sense of style and fashion (macaroni, in the slang of the time).

There was a tsunami of change in men's fashion around 1800, when the 18th century long hair, knee breeches, frock coat, and tricorn gave way to more modern-appearing garb. Men gave up the colorful and flamboyant clothes they had traditionally worn and adopted drab colors and plain tailoring. It was the death of the cavalier horseman and musketeer, all leather, codpieces, pantaloons and feathers, the male peacock in all his plumage, proudly displaying in silk above his pewter-buckled pumps a finely turned ankle and calf. Much of it was due to military fashion, Napoleon ordered his troops to cut their hair as a body louse hygiene measure, and it caught on. Later, the Prussian Army stopped dressing their infantry in bright colors for battlefield identification and put them in field gray (smokeless powder rifles had replaced black powder muskets!) Around the turn of the 20th century, the man's suit pretty much stabilized into its present drab form, and post-WWI women's skirts shot up overnight above the knees. Clothing and style has been a folk art, albeit practiced most by those who could afford it.

But the establishment of a fashion industry, one pushing new lines and styles for every season of every new year, and one aimed primarily at women, is something new. Any ideas how this came about? And who decides why taupe is "in" for this summer?