Wow! Another astonishingly good book.

I expected something like a history of clothing, but this is much more a book of sociology, an investigation of why clothing was static in most societies, changed year after year once European societies reached a certain stage, split into essentially static men's and dynamic women's fashions, and then fragmented into the current free-for-all.
The argument is essentially that
* clothing exists as a part of the conspicuous consumption/conspicuous leisure nexus that allows the wealthy to show off
* once the class structure (in European society) starts to become even slightly malleable (in the sense that a middle class starts to arise with at least some excess wealth ), that middle class apes the dress of the upper class
* this leads to the upper class striving to differentiate themselves, but, of course, whatever they change to is likewise copied by their inferiors
* however in modern times, with the demise of an upper class and with many more role models (actresses, pop stars, sports stars), there's no longer one style that represents a monolithic upper class and thereby constrains most clothing.

There's much much more in here though:
- why servants and children are dressed as they are,
- why men's clothing changed much slower than women's clothing after the industrial revolution,
- why pretty much every society on earth (the Arab's are the only counter-example I can think of, perhaps maybe the Nigerians) has adopted Western clothes
- and so on.

Especially interesting is that the discussion is rooted in social psychology rather than in lazy cliches like blaming the market. While, obviously enough, corporations aggressively exploit these pathologies in human psychology, they do not create them.

More than that, the discussion allows one to understand the appearance of other items, even if one doesn't care much about clothes. A concrete example is how the Titanium Powerbook, so glamorous-looking when it first came out, now looks dowdy when set beside its Aluminum Powerbook successor.
I now expect to see exactly the same thing happen during the next year or two with respect to iPods; a successor to the white+shiny metal iPod will appear that will make us look at the current versions (1st through 4th gen) and wonder how we found them so cool-looking.
[Since I wrote this, I would say this has happened. iPod mini's had a different look from the classic iPod. iPod nanos started off looking something like the classic iPod but have recently morphed to a (currently considered) more glamorous anodized aluminum look.
Steven Levitt's theory of the popularity of names appears to follow the same dynamic, both the lower classes adopting the names of the upper classes, and the fragmentation of a once rather more unitary upper class.] ( )