This collection of 28 fashion essays previously published in "The New York Times Magazine", "The New Yorker" and "The Atlantic" examines clothing and fashion as part of a larger cultural debate and as a barometer of social and aesthetic change. In essays published during the 1980s and 1990s, the author reflects on a broad range of fashion subjects, from famous designers to designer eyeglasses, from the elegance of a Chanel suit to the decline of elegance itself in the 1990s, from Gianni Versace's legitimisation of vulgarity to the advent of athletic clothing as a fashion uniform. Longer essays from "The New Yorker" and "The Atlantic" are interspersed with 450-word pieces from the "The New York Times Magazine"....