What you’re wearing
has a story.

And much earlier: in 2008 an excavation at Lengberg Castle, in Tyrol, turned up linen garments with cut cups. Carbon-dated to the 15th century.

The patent’s case isn’t aesthetic, it’s practical: a garment “backless, so it does not interfere with any style of evening gown”.

She sold the patent to Warner for $1,500. The factory made the model for one season and dropped it for lack of sales. Her own company didn’t take off either.

Then she changed her name and her life. As Caresse Crosby, she set up the Black Sun Press in Paris and published James Joyce in 1929 and D. H. Lawrence the same year.

Time magazine, in its 1970 obituary, called her the literary godmother of the Lost Generation.

The patent says “Mary P. Jacob”. She only took the name she became known by ten years later.

Inside: keys, coins, jewelry, a watch, a thimble, a letter, a miniature portrait. Working women carried the tools of their trade.

That mattered. Under English law, a married woman couldn’t own property of her own until the property acts of the 1880s. The bag tied at her waist was the safe she had.

Two historians found 572 Old Bailey court cases for theft of these pockets.

Around 1800 dresses slimmed down, fabric got lighter and the bag no longer fit underneath. Enter the handbag: the “reticule”, from the Latin reticulum, little net.

But one didn’t replace the other — that story is too neat. The two lived side by side for almost a century; the tied pocket just changed its trade name, becoming the “money apron” or the “travelling pocket”.

What never came back was the sewn-in pocket. In 2018, 80 pairs of jeans from 20 brands were measured: an average depth of 14.3 cm in women’s against 23.1 in men’s.

Only 40% of women’s front pockets fit a phone from the three leading brands. And the average price is the same: $80 against $81.

In 1927 she knitted a black sweater with a white bow worked into the knit itself: a trompe-l’œil, not a sewn-on bow. Vogue published it. A New York store ordered forty. The house was born from that.

In 1931 Lili de Álvarez walked onto Wimbledon in one of her divided skirts, and the press treated it as a scandal. She was also one of the first to put a visible zip on a couture garment, when zips were for boots.

She brought Dalí, Cocteau and Man Ray into the clothes: the 1937 lobster dress that Wallis Simpson wore, the hat shaped like a shoe.

She saw Daisy Fellowes’s 17-carat pink diamond and took a colour from it. She called it Shocking and gave the perfume the same name, in 1937, in a torso-shaped bottle. The pink is still the house’s signature.

Two women, two opposite ideas of fashion: Chanel stood for elegance and comfort; Schiaparelli, for clothes as art and as provocation. The story goes that at a ball Chanel asked her to dance and steered her into a lit candelabra; the dress caught fire and was put out with soda water. The teller is Bettina Ballard, a Vogue editor.

She closed the house in 1954 and died in 1973 without seeing it reopen. Today Schiaparelli dresses the entire red carpet.

The line everyone repeats is that he abolished the corset. In 1906 the promotional material for his own collection still shows the corset underneath, and other houses were already loosening the waist before him.

And the corset didn’t disappear: it was replaced by the bra and the girdle. One garment was swapped for two.

In 1911 he launches the “jupe à l’entrave”, the hobble skirt: so narrow at the bottom that it shortened your stride. The house that sold freedom put out the garment that most restricted walking all century.

He wrote it himself: “I freed the bust, but I shackled the legs.”

His couture house closed in 1929. He died in Paris on 30 April 1944, ruined and forgotten.

Magazines were already living off this. Where the waist falls and what the fabric does as it leaves it: that is what the Paris fashion plates were talking about two centuries ago.

And it had a name of its own. In the 19th century it was called a basque: the panel that springs from the waist and falls over the skirt. It’s what you’re looking at in this plate.

In 1947 Dior fooled the eye. The Bar jacket hid padding and horsehair at the hips underneath: the waist looked narrower because the hips were wider.

In the eighties it came back with shoulder pads, and that is where its reputation for excess comes from: the same piece that was a break with the past in 1947 sounded like too much forty years later.

Around 2011 it came back to the runways, and within two years it was everywhere, from the runway to the high-street shops. It’s the route followed by almost everything you end up buying without knowing where it came from.

He applied for the patent on August 26, 1856, aged 18, and set up a factory with his father and brother. By December 1857 he was already supplying the color to silk dyers.

And he sold it under a borrowed name: “Tyrian purple”, the color of emperors, which was extracted from mollusks and cost more than gold — ten thousand creatures for one gram. The name “mauve” came later, and from France, after the flower.

In August 1859 Punch magazine published “The Mauve Measles”. It described the fashion as an epidemic — it starts with the ribbons and ends up covering the whole person.

What followed: magenta, the aniline blues, synthetic alizarin in 1869. The whole industrial chemistry of color, and later the pharmaceutical industry, came out of it.

He was looking for a medicine and found a color. The color paid for the chemistry that ended up giving us the medicines.

To show a dress, put a woman in it. Marie Vernet wore the shawls at Gagelin so customers could see them; they married in 1851. Worth turned that into a profession, with models hired by the house. She was the first.

A ball at the Tuileries, 1860: Princess Pauline von Metternich wears Worth. The next day Empress Eugénie wants to meet him. In her memoirs the princess put it plainly: Worth was made, and she was ruined — no more 300-franc dresses.

From the mid-1860s the house stitched a label with its name into the waistband of its dresses. By the late 1880s the label carried his signature, handwritten. Like a painter’s.

A dressmaker became an author. Every name stitched into the clothes you wear comes from that label.

In 2018, radiocarbon dating of the powder in a Louvre tube bearing the names of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye confirmed it: the phosgenite was synthetic.

What for? In 2010, researchers from the CNRS and the Louvre found that these compounds, in tiny doses, stimulate the production of nitric oxide in skin cells, one of the body’s defences. Perhaps against infections. Perhaps: it was in a lab, not in people.

And the sun? People keep saying kohl worked as sunglasses. No Egyptian text says so. It’s a reasonable hypothesis, not a fact.

Thousands of years later, the black line hasn’t changed. Only the formula has — and just as well: theirs was made of lead.

It wasn’t even just paper: Dura-Weve, 93% cellulose and 7% rayon. It came flame-proofed — until it was washed. The label warned that after water it was dangerously flammable.

It became a craze. Mars, a hosiery maker in Asheville, was selling 80,000 paper dresses a week. A vice-president told Life magazine in 1966 that within five years 75% of the country would be wearing disposable clothes.

And the Souper Dress, the one with the soup cans, isn’t by Warhol. Campbell’s made it itself: one dollar and two soup labels. The Met states in no uncertain terms that it is not his design.

It was over by 1968: they were stiff, they tore, they faded. Wear-once-and-throw-away clothing didn’t catch on. It caught on sixty years later, and not in paper.

The nickname came from her thin legs: they called her “Sticks”, and she hated it. It became “Twigs”, then “Twiggy”.

In March 1967 she arrived in New York, aged 17. Newsweek put her on the cover in April, American Vogue several times that year, and Mattel released a doll with her name.

She modelled from 1966 to 1970 and left the profession at twenty. In 1971 she won two Golden Globes for Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend: newcomer of the year and best actress in a comedy or musical. In 2019 she was made a Dame.

Four years were enough to become the face of a decade. Then she chose another life.