You would think that in fashion, vanity would be the deadliest sin. Of course it isn’t – it is the highest virtue in our world. We brag about vanity, we flaunt it, we compliment each other on it. Not greed either, it is not uncommon to hear “excessive” as an effusive, un-ironic compliment. We take pride in taking pride, rewarding big egos. Sloth is enshrined in the cult of “effortlessness“. Lust glosses over every advertisement.

Fashion is not bashful in declaring its unholy adoration of of unwholesome decadence, no wonder these themes are a common indulgence in magazine spreads. While it may pay lipstick-service to it, fashion doesn’t concern itself too much with the stylish possibilities of virtue. Though it is true that fashion deems gluttony abhorrent, it is by no means the worst infraction a stylish citizen can make.

No, the sin that we deny, the one we speak of in furtive, hushed tones, like addicts in denial, is Envy. Every fashion friend that I’ve had the privilege of an honest conversation with has revealed their own battles with jealousy. These rare, candid confessions elicit a kind of catharsis, because envy is the one sin we can’t share on social media. We all have to deal with it alone.

What is it about the fashion/envy axis that causes so much heartache and fear? It is because envy is the mirror image of desire. Desire, in every connotation of the word, is what fashion strives for. Flip the coin, same value: what we envy is what we yearn for.

We’re gluttons for our feeds these days. Observe what internet missives out there irk you have in common. If you’re anything like me, it’s because those updates touch on a tender spot. Almost always, the essence is: I want what she’s got. Why her and not me? We’ve all felt it, alone. It makes us act in peculiar ways. It infiltrates what we say and do. A little, every once in a while, is totally normal. A lot is devastating.

As fashion careerists, we’re in the business of desire, so envy is a recurring professional hazard – both for the envious and the envied. Figuring out how to flip it is valuable for your mental health, and your success. Because our most heartfelt wishes are unique to all of us, everyone’s strategy to deal with desire’s dangerous counterpart should be different. But because it’s a common thing we all share, my own philosophy might be worth sharing too. Here’s what I try to do.

Give yourself a break. We all feel jealous sometimes.

Edit your social media feeds to remove envy-provoking content. There’s no point in punishing yourself, following is always optional. To be honest, there are certain individuals that I enjoy following a lot who occasionally produce green-light updates for me. Depending on how resilient I’m feeling, I’ll un-follow and re-follow them. Since I can’t hide it, I’m pretty sure they know what it’s about – I’ve have some followers who behave like that too.

Achieve your desires. As you begin to gain confidence and accomplishments, you’ll notice that envy begins to fade away. Conquer desire, conquer envy. So always go for what you want. If you don’t know what you want, examine your envy. Is there a theme, a common flashpoint? Take your focus away from the envy, point yourself towards the desire, and go for it.

If you are the object of envy: be humble, be empathetic, and above all carry on doing whatever you’re doing. If you are inciting envy, it is because you are also lighting desire on fire. You’ve struck a vein of fashion gold. Run with it.

We’re four years into fashion blogging’s California Dream. In 2006, fashion blogging was obscure and virtually ignored. In 2008, the mainstream fashion media turned a handful of street style and personal style bloggers into stars. Brands jumped in on the hype and blog campaign budgets burgeoned. For a while now it’s seemed like even minor bloggers can score major partnerships and c/o has become common. Going pro began to seem like an easy route to fame and fortune and self-help sources set the standard. And standard was what we got.

Gold rush mentality is for imitators, not innovators. Thus, the current state of fashion blogging: a future archive of indistinguishable individuals wielding SLRs, and a rotation of affectations in lieu of the new. The division of attention is yielding diminishing returns for middle-of-the-packers – brands are bailing in favour of celebrities, the industry is losing enthusiasm for blog coverage, readers are disgruntled and comment culture has devolved.

Starting a fashion blog in 2006 was delusional because no one was doing it… launching a fashion blog in 2012 is even more delusional because everyone is doing it. If you’re in fashion, you should know which edge of the curve is worth entering. Which means that every fashion blogger with any sense is wondering what’s next for our medium.

Style blogging is not dead. Street style photography is as old as photography itself – it won’t die, and there will be successors to the current crop. The well-dressed girl with the mysterious power to sell us whatever is on her back is as old as time and as today’s it girls turn into women, tomorrow’s it girl personal style bloggers will replace them.

Extraordinary talents like Rumi Neely and Tommy Ton will always find an audience. In the past decade, what happened was that technology created a gap, briefly allowing more ordinary talents a taste of notoriety while the media establishment struggled with transition. Now, the tide is reversing; instead of blogger-turned-professional, we have entered the era of professional-turned-blogger. As established venues for their work disappear, experienced creatives are out of necessity, getting over their technophobia. They are in the perfect position to benefit from the rise of individualized media at the expense of a masthead. They bring their skills and reputations with them, significantly raising the top standard of work we see online.

The result is that the barriers to enter fashion, which were artificially low for the past five years are returning to their usual place – high. Amateurs aspirants who managed to slip in through the internet’s side door now have to rely on some combination of hard work, talent, connections, money, beauty, good timing and luck to stay inside fashion’s good graces. Just like everyone else.

Since I posted about some of my favourite fashion queens, I’ve been alerted to a couple of outstanding omissions and discovered a couple new favourites. While not all of them are necessarily fashion-y, all of them have a keen sense of majesty and thrilling stories about how they used their power. Here they are.

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Queen Nefertiti played a symbolic role in a religious revolution. Otherwise, very little is known of her life or death. Her bust, discovered in 1912, has become an indelible modern image of feminine majesty, just as her alleged torso evokes idealized fertility.

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Eleanor of Aquitaine is remembered as an icon of courtly love, but her real life story (as I learned thanks to BBC’s She-Wolves) was much more interesting than fairy tales. As one of just a handful of fierce Medieval Queens who lived in an era where power had to be physically fought for, Eleanor’s role as a monarch was dependent on being the mother of an heir, and very precarious despite her considerable intelligence and ambition.

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Queen Nzinga of the Ndongo, like Hatshupset, avoided the question of gender by crowning herself King. With a wily way of playing her opponents off of one another, she secured her kingdom in the turbulent era of early colonialism, playing an ambiguous, notorious role in history. The most famous Nzinga anecdote has her imperiously perching on a servant’s back when no chair was offered to her.

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Empress Elisabeth of Austria is perhaps the most fashion-y queen of them all. Thanks to Lorna for properly introducing me to her! Brilliant, eccentric, and vain, “Sisi” remains forever beloved for her cult of beauty. Her hair took four hours a day to maintain, during which she would study, she had a very unusual diet and perhaps even an eating disorder, was dressed in exquisite House of Worth gowns, and when she aged she ceased allowing her image to be reproduced.

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Are there any more amazing fashion queens out there? I love discovering more!

The origins of my interest in fashion were survey texts I found in the library of the small town I grew up in. Most fashion history books tend to be organized one decade per chapter, simplifying the chaos of costume history into clearly demarcated digits. Often they include cute little charts on silhouettes and hemlines like the one above. I loved the neat little rows of figures, and without a doubt that deep, early impression formed the format I would adopt as an illustrator.

As I discovered fashion at the end of the 1980s as an eight year old, the tidy division of decades was beginning to break down. The sharp-shouldered silhouette dissolved in the 1990s. I remember looking forward to the end of the century so I could see the 20th century laid out in a row of 10 clearly defined figures, but of course by the time that happened, I was old enough to realize that the 1990s didn’t fit the formula. There was no single silhouette that somehow contained the essence of the decade.

Having exhausted the survey-texts of my hometown library, in 2001 I started fashion school and began systematically working my way through the fashion, textile, sewing, art, design, illustration and photography sections of the library, as well as the periodical archives. I got my tuition’s worth out of those stacks. As I did this, fashion’s patterns began to get more and more complex.

Still, there’s something satisfying, if superficial, about summing up a decade’s definition. Silhouettes have stopped standing in for decades and now signify more abstract concepts. This post is about how I think of the last four decades, and the character of the designers that emerged in each one.

The louche 1970s silhouette of bell bottoms and blowouts does seem to suit a decade of deconstruction. There was a great relaxation of sexual signifiers – men and women both grew their hair long, abandoned structured clothing and embraced colour and pattern. Casual came of age. The last modern western youth culture drummed the postmodern death knell with punk. Exhausting modern street style, designers and rock star trendsetters alike turned to importing inspiration from the past and abroad. The frenzy of appropriation increased the momentum of the homogenization of international fashion culture.

In contrast, the designers who wove their labels in this decade are autobiographical auteurs. Giorgio Armani, Diane von Furstenberg, Betsey Johnson, Calvin Klein, Jean Paul Gaultier… and at the end of the decade, Gianni Versace.

The 1980s was the last decade that did have a stereotypical silhouette – sharp-shouldered supermen and women. It was the last time media was still monolithic enough to brand a decade with a catchphrase. There is an essential straight-forwardness  to the 1980s that we will never recapture. Rich people looked like rich people, and that’s what fashion was for. Fashion was still a small scene and mysterious at the beginning of the decade. It parlayed that glamour into the big business fashion has become.

By the end, it was celebrified, corporate, and at the peak of its power. Supermodels. Branding, a pretty straight-forward way to commoditize. Money was cheap. The many designers that established their businesses in this decade became rich and powerful and continue to dominate decades later, with huge companies. Heavy hitters from the class include Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Miuccia Prada, Yohji Yamamoto, Dolce & Gabbana, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, and Michael Kors.

The 1990s, the decade that defies easy visualization, was fashion’s intellectual phase. It evolved from a straightforward business into something much more complex and self-aware. For the first time it was the subject of rigorous critical and academic attention, and schools became very important and influential. Thus, the dialogue between designers and media became much more sophisticated. Braindead branding was abandoned and designers began to challenge the boundaries of fashion using narrative and spectacle.

Just as the television monolith exploded into a multi-channel universe, so did fashion. The demand for increasing theatre and provocation sped up. Youth cultures were practically stillborn before they were absorbed, and the world was plundered for every available aesthetic. That’s why there’s no unifying symbol for the decade.

In retrospect, the brainy 1990s was an amazing decade for fashion and produced many diverse, compelling creators. They have not yet been able to build the massive empires of their predecessors, though. Alumni include Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Anna Sui, Isabel Marant, Jeremy Scott, Viktor & Rolf, Roland Mouret, Rick Owens, and Junya Watanabe.

The 2000s was a difficult decade to enter fashion. The success and storytelling of the last two decade’s designers inspired a lot of us to apply to fashion school. At the same time, like every industry, fashion was facing the challenges of a media transition and the consequences of an increasingly complicated world. Again, there is no way to nail down a single silhouette to tie the aughties into a neat knot.

Money has become much more expensive, just as media has become cheaper. Fashion has become more about media than the other way around. The scarcity of resources, and the division of attention has produced a very harsh environment for new names on labels. Perhaps it’s no surprise that designers of this decade now often turn to uncontroversial, technique-based design or celebrity dressing. Fashion seems like it has become more muted, or maybe we’ve all just become jaded from too much visual stimulation.

It’s hard to tell which designers from this decade will be able to establish long-term careers. My bets are on Alexander Wang, Proenza Schouler, Christopher Kane, Gareth Pugh, and Zac Posen.

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Who knows what’s in store for the 2010s? We live in interesting times. The only thing that’s certain is that I can’t draw an outline around fashion anymore.

When I read about this UN expert stating that Rodarte’s Fall 2012 “Australian” inspired collection was offensive, I was… confused. The designers had licensed the images from the artist, so it wasn’t like they had done anything illegal or hateful. I couldn’t imagine the Rodarte sisters in their studio plotting to nefariously decontextualize Aboriginal art. What is cultural appropriation, anyway? And why am I so culturally insensitive that I can’t even tell when appropriation is offensive? Is there something wrong with me?

I don’t like to jump to conclusions so these questions led to a long line of online inquiry… and at the end of a long weekend reading all sides of a relatively new and controversial subject, I still feel ambivalent about it. A lot of what is written about cultural appropriation on the internet is very difficult for a new initiate to the subject to get into – much of what is available is accusatory and angry and doesn’t offer any clear directives. It seems like this kind of rhetoric builds a barrier to understanding what exactly the issue is, because it took me quite a while to find a demystifying description, and I don’t think most people would take that kind of time.

To get my problem out of the way first – I think the reason why I am culturally insensitive is twofold. One – I enjoy offensive stuff. To me, fashion needs friction to be interesting. The edges where fashion offends are where new fashions form. As such, I tend to view stuff that others perceive as offensive with detached curiousity. Two – I’m white, atheist, and have been raised with many privileges within the world’s most dominant culture. I have no experience of belonging to a distinct race, religion or culture, so my ability to truly empathize is limited. I have to be deliberate to be conscientious.

So, why are the Rodarte sisters culturally insensitive? Many critics suggested that the designers should have known better in the aftermath of the 2010 M.A.C. collaboration controversy, where the names of the cosmetic colours referenced a town in Mexico most famous for systematic violence against women. In that case, they released an official apology and retraction, and M.A.C. pulled the line and donated projected revenues to appropriate charities. Like many followers of fashion, it was the first time I learned the story of Juarez.

In all of the coverage of the controversy, I didn’t find anyone who asked why the inspiration referenced was so dark. The collection itself was, in my opinion, one of Rodarte’s career highlights – I even created a paper doll inspired by it. To me, Rodarte’s design identity belongs in the same category as artists like Lana Del Rey – let’s call it American Decay. Sadness and dissolution are part of the beauty. The sisters take a lot of their inspiration and identity (even their name) from the southwestern United States where they grew up and are still located. The Mexican border is close to home, and their natural proclivity as narrative designers towards creating sad beauty explains why they were drawn to Juarez because of, not in spite of, its tragic story. The distressed Quinceañera dresses created an indelible impression and were well received.

All of these are reasons are why Rodarte Fall 2010 was a successful collection in a creative sense – it told a story that obviously resonated with the artists – and in turn, their audience. The risk of cultural insensitivity in this case was well worth the artistic result. The makeup collaboration however, is by its very nature a commercial endeavour. This is why it diminished its source material, instead of honouring it.

So why did the Fall 2012 “Australian” collection also diminish its subject? To the critical eye, the pretty dresses with their printed motifs seem innocuous, even boring. As far as collections go, it was less successful in creative terms. Why would the sisters choose to source such distant reference points that resulted in a predictable, dull collection? Why did they choose to use the idea of Australia, rather than visiting the country itself?

Fashion designers tend to resort to appropriation once they’ve exhausted their own autobiographical resources. Yves Saint Laurent launched into a long series of appropriations in the seventies as his creative faculties were in decline. After abandoning the Dior tradition of using abstract “lines” labeled with letters of the alphabet, YSL found success culture-mining local European street style, the world of art, and his own childhood in Morocco. After that, then what? In his case, it was Orientalism.

Fashion is ever-hungry for novelty. While many designers start out using their own experiences as launching points, the ability to turn that into something new and unusual on a relentless six-month schedule is creatively exhausting for even the best and brightest. While it may seem like cultural appropriation is the lazier way out – and it is in the sense that infusing novelty from a diffuse dominant culture is near-impossible – you just wouldn’t accuse fashion designers of being lazy if you knew one or tried to be one. It is one of the most demanding creative professions both in terms of time and money. Why did the Rodarte sisters not take a trip to Australia? They probably would have loved to – what is most likely is they didn’t have the time – and if industry gossip is true, they don’t have the budget either. Fashionable appropriation just isn’t as great a money-maker as it was when Pierre Berge launched Opium in 1977.

Cultural appropriation is a risk that fashion designers take – sometimes garnering success and acclaim, and sometimes provoking offense and controversy. In either scenario, they’re staying in the game, where the rules state that boring the media means getting ignored by the media. So if designers can’t co-opt other people’s culture, what else can they do?

Tom Ford is the ultimate example of a designer who has remained true to his autobiographical antecedents. When he’s criticized, it’s for always doing the same thing regardless of what label he works at or how many seasons he’s presented riffs on the same self-centered obsessions. Because he’s Tom Ford, he doesn’t apologize. Ford is not in fashion to push it forward, it it is more important for him to trust his creative instincts. Most independent designers don’t have the sheer power to be able to get away with this kind of obstinate consistency and stay relevant.

The other option for narrative-driven first-world fashion designers is mining the many subcultures within the dominant culture rather than citing indiginous and endangered cultures. There are a vast array of examples of wild style tribes available in the margins of the mainstream – but that doesn’t mean that controversy is avoided by doing so, and the aesthetic variety is limited to post-modernism.

Perhaps these are the reasons why in the last decade, in terms of design, the major trend is towards creativity via technique rather than subject.

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I like a cultural free market, because I want fashion to be as fascinating as possible. I think that it’s good for designers to risk offense. Offending people and provoking criticism has positive consequences for cultural awareness, whether indirectly by publicizing examples of oppression or directly by questioning the modern validity of traditional cultural practices. The risk of so much dismal rehashing of stereotypes is worth it for allowing the shocking possibilities of irreverence and audacity.

Now that the picture is coming into focus, it is clear we chose the wrong frame.

In the earlier days of fashion blogging (2005-2007) we chose media as our antecedent. We thought blogging was going to revolutionize the way fashion was covered. How? It could be faster. Or maybe more reflective of real people. Hopefully, it was going to be less beholden to corporate interests.

The fashion media itself reflected this naive narrative right back at us through a filter of cynicism. We were interlopers, seat-stealers. We were characterized as teenagers and wannabes, in breathless awe, incapable of critical thought, and too easily bought. The bloggers vs. critics narrative was born, and persists.

Everyone was wrong. The journalists were wrong – and so were we. Fashion criticism is under threat from the mismanaged collapse of an obsolete corporate business model combined with influence financial and otherwise from fashion’s heavyweights. Is it really endangered by a bunch of misunderstood kids? Come on.

It’s like comparing szezont a fazonnal. Fashion writers pride themselves in cultivating distance from their subject, gather vast amounts of experience and knowledge, and expressing their analysis through writing. Their role is, ideally, as objective as possible.

Opposite – fashion bloggers are subjective. In fact, they are often their own subjects, and as such are wholly inseparable from their subject of choice. Rather than analytical, they are expressive.

As individuals inextricable from their medium, fashion bloggers share much more in common with designers than most fashion writers. Designers and bloggers both tend to work under their own name, and often use their own image as muse. They both tend to be intensely visual, and rarely articulate with words. Some of the tropes of fashion blogging – like the mood board – are literally imitative of how designers work – assembling pictures rather than words to build a visual diagram of what they represent. The outfit post, the street style shot echo the visual standard of designer’s output – croquis, runway exit.

Great bloggers are brilliant at expressing themselves through images and words – just like the most successful designers are. Media is not used to translate reality in an informative way, instead it is used to bring their personality to life in the imaginations of an audience. For lack of a better phrase – brand building. A vivid ability to create an impression shows the individual has the raw material for making a creative career. As a blogger myself I find the entire process to be far more intuitive and artistic than it appears – it comes from inside you.

As such, many talented bloggers are using media in the same way designers do – to expressively establish a reputation for their work, whether the career is blogging itself or something else – photography, styling, illustration, modelling, editing and of course writing. This means both bloggers and designers are economically chained to their cultural contributions – a terrible environment for encouraging critical thought.

If designers and bloggers belong in the realm of fashion’s id, fashion criticism is the ego. Fashion goes on regardless of whether it gets analyzed or not. In fact, journalistic criticism is relatively new – Horyn herself dates her craft to 1993. So, it is a mature cultural development that requires a sophisticated audience and a handful of professionals with significant experience and a unique complement of skills. No wonder they’re so rare – and that’s also why few bloggers will ever play that field.

Fashion critics do understand the importance of putting a face to the words – there’s a reason why Suzy Menkes styles her hair that way. Still, Menkes uses her own image as a tool, not as a muse. Her focus is outward, and she has a major non-fashion-industry employer to bulwark against money pressure, and those distinctions are why her and her colleagues are cut from a different cloth than the fashion bloggers they’re often compared to.

The heirs for criticism are on their way, because Horyn, Givhan, Menkes and others established an audience for it. A few online voices are carrying on the tradition of covering the shows with candour, intelligence, spirit and wit, and their experience is building with time. Excellent fashion criticism may be as rare as ever, and the profession will be forced to adapt within a changing system, but it is not endangered.

Princesses are ubiquitous. Queens are epic. Here are a few of my favourite fashion queens.

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Pharoah Hatshepsut

Her story is a dramatic one. She is a woman who crowned herself king – and recorded her image as a man’s. Hatshepsut represents a very calculated, symbolic image-making. This is what fashion queens have in common.

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Empress Theodora

Another amazing story of transformation. Theodora remains a thoroughly charismatic enigma, a woman who used acting, style and bravado to win power and awe.

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Queen Elizabeth I

Another story of an unlikely candidate seizing and holding power. She used her clothes as literal armour of wealth, covered with pearls and jewels, and a literal halo of a ruff. At a time when both kings and queens liked to power dress, she overpowered.

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Marie Antoinette

I have to include her in every survey post I do, because she is the crux of modern femininity, or maybe a warning for what can happen when fashion takes over. Her use of image was amazing, prescient, ill-timed, and indelible. She may be dead, but her style returns to fashion over and over again.

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Empress Eugenie

The second empire restored the silhouette of Versailles with generous skirts and nipped in waists and tons of jewels. The romantic and super-feminine look was wielded with expert womanly wiles by Eugenie – another story of intrepid social climbing with style.

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Queen Alexandra

Her story is a sadder one, she doesn’t seem as much an agent of her own destiny as the others. But she is notable fashion-wise for bringing big emphasis to a collar of pearls, thus establishing the iconography for 20th century female power.

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Jacqueline Kennedy

Though not a queen, she was a modern, mortal queen – she dressed the part as if she had been born for it. In simple, spare strokes she wore the crown and the pearls with perfect modern sense.

Queen Rania

She is the most compelling modern fashion queen, an elemental beauty and aware of how she presents herself. She is a living queen who lives up to her role.

or, what final fashion is

Sometimes I say that Final Fashion is just a meaningless alliteration – but over the course of many years it has come to have a few definitions in my mind, the most amusing one being: that moment when reality intrudes on the fantasy of fashion.

I adore these moments. The other weekend while bedridden I discovered My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding which is a series of poignant, high-camp crashes between fairy-tales and physics. These young brides are enamoured with the gowns of Disney princesses, which they not only imitate but elaborate on. The brides ignore the fact that the princesses are two dimensional and the proportions of their dresses will not move with the same animated verve and bounce in reality. In fact, these dresses require their wearers to push them along with an oddly appropriate tough-little-girl kicking motion.

Every time I watch a gypsy bride kick her hem down the aisle, I think: that’s final fashion.

When an item of clothing or cosmetic procedure reaches the point of final fashion, it starts to physically impede, limit opportunities and even harm. Shoes that trip up entire casts of models, like in the Prada Spring 2009 show. Skirts that bind legs so tight walking is impossible. Glasses that no one can see through. Face tattoos that render people unemployable. Botox that paralyzes actresses’ ability to emote.

The instance where fashion fails to impress and instead absurdly breaks its own spell is the beginning of the end of a trend. That is final fashion.

Whatever her function, it is clear that the graceful bulges of the Venus of Willendorf are an idealized exaggeration of the female form. Even though she is at least 25,000 years old, to my eyes she is an obvious fashion figure. The belly doesn’t get the glorification much any more. And yet, every so often in modern western history (and I’m sure outside of it, though I am oblivious) the belly gets to stand out.

This idealized torso, possibly of the Egyptian queen and famed beauty Nefertiti and dating to around 1350 BC, is quite slender while still featuring a pronounced belly. The Egyptian ideal is quite exaggerated. While ancient Greek representations of female forms were certainly not thin by modern standards, they were balanced proportionally, with the belly not standing out any more than any other feature.

Jan van Eyck’s 1434 masterpiece The Arnolifini Portrait features a fashionable couple, possibly celebrating their betrothal. Many modern viewers wonder if she was pregnant – all evidence points to no, and as you can see in this van Eyck depiction of Saint Catherine (on the right), the woman is just wearing contemporary fashion. The Arnolfini family were merchants, and are showing off their wealth with abundant quantities of fabric. Her gesture is possibly meant to indicate hopes for a fruitful marriage – hopes that were never realized.

The high-waisted silhouette featuring a convex belly was a long running trend for the 15th and 16th century female form – whether depicted dressed or undressed, by Botticelli in 1482 (as above) or by Cranach in 1528. These are fashionable bellies, not pregnant bellies, though it seems obvious that their fecund appearance was a significant part of their attraction. This trend very gradually, and in different ways in various geographical regions, began to evolve into the conical, geometrical torso of the Elizabethan woman.

The peascod belly (this example from 1569) is a bit more ridiculous to modern eyes – as it was to commenters at the time. The garment that clothed a man’s torso – the doublet – went through various phases over a few centuries, from more padding in the chest during medieval times, then less padding, and then more padding again. In the 16th century, the padding extended at the lower torso. The male belly became an abstract shape, described as a “peascod”. Echoed in armour, this protrusion was sometimes almost pointy.

The look was achieved with padding and was balanced out with padded sleeves, codpieces, stuffed hose and square toes - a bombastic silhouette most famously worn by Henry VIII. In this case, the look seems to be about abundance in a different form – masculine girth was probably meant to evoke solidity and strength – and later on as fashion turned, reeked of excess and machismo.

These young princes in 1637 are wearing heritage armour with distinctive peascod shaping, though by this time the style for this shape in the doublet had fallen out of favour.

Female and male waists alike remained nipped in throughout the 17th and 18th centuries until the French Revolution. A sudden resurgence in classical styles created a dramatic change in fashion and for a couple decades, women abandoned the waist. While the belly isn’t exactly the focal point of this trend, displaying a sense of relaxed roundness (these fashion plate examples are from 1806) does seem to be considered attractive.

Outstanding stomachs have been absent from modern fashion ever since. Even when styles are relatively waistless, as in the 1920s or the 1960s, the concavity of desirable bellies remains a constant. When lower torsos do appear in the spotlight, it’s only under two circumstances – here capably demonstrated by pop singer Christina Aguilera:

The turn-of-our-century trend for midriffs doesn’t quite compare to the other examples I’ve cited because the focus is on the absence rather than the presence of a belly. Still, expansive gaps between upper and lower garments do draw all the attention to the navel, and as with the other feminine examples, it is very sexual.

The trend towards displaying the pregnant belly – shocking as recent as 1991 when Demi Moore graced Vanity Fair – has now become a mundane facebook trope. Google “belly” and most of what you’ll find is garishly painted, proudly exhibited pregnant bellies. Pregnancy, which used to be something to conceal, has become something of a bulls-eye, with or without apparent irony. Does that indicate that fashion is full-circle cycling towards to fertility worship?

Sort of like square toes, bellies only seem to make sporadic appearances, and without any sort of obvious recurring pattern. It also seems like it is wholly out of our control – the hue and cry over the absurdity of the peascod belly did nothing to end its thrust. Modern campaigns meant to promote the idea of all bodies being considered beautiful – belly-ful or otherwise – are more than a bit hopeless. In history as now, bellies are only idealized under occasional circumstances.

What connects a head to a toe? The human being in between. They say that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their shoes, and leading that line of thought is the shape of the toe.

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Pointed toes still carry connotations of aristocracy. The French Revolution all but ended the era of men wearing pointed pumps. Men renounced fashion and leisure and adopted more practical clothing that emphasized the worthiness of work. As such, the pointed toe – like most features that are considered more fashionable than practical – is considered the most feminine toe shape.

The only time pointed toes are considered masculine in modernity is when they are equestrian – the classic cowboy boot’s point is meant to make sliding into stirrups simpler. It’s indicative that points are better for riding than walking.

Off the saddle, the pointed toe is the most impractical. It crushes the toes together and causes health problems. The extension to the length of the foot leaves the toe vulnerable to wear – pointed toes only really look good fresh out of the box. They’re not for working in, in either sense. Today they are considered the domain of high-maintenance women and dandified men. Points really offend some people.

Economically, pointed toes tend to come into fashion when times are good, perhaps too good. In 20th century, points were in vogue at the turn, and again in the 20s, the 50s and 60s, and the 80s.

Points are about extremes – a shoe celebrating individuality, materialism, hierachy and sexual distinctions – they symbolize conservative values without being conservative about it.

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Round toe shoes, on the other foot, are proletariat. Round toes are for working in, in both senses. If you look on any menswear forum, the overwhelming consensus is that a round toe is the only sartorially acceptable, masculine choice. Any other toe is considered too try-hard for modern man.

The military boot, the trainer, the ballet flat – the round toes are task-driven by design, but well-rounded in terms of versatility. Being the most practical shoe, they’re common in all senses of the word and worn by ordinary people by default, whatever the trends of the time happen to be. They’re as ubiquitous as Ugg5 and Cr0cs. Still, they’re just as almost as abstract a shape as points or squares, not echoing anatomy. Anatomically-inspired footwear that echoes the bare foot – shoes with articulated toes or thong sandals – are considered either very casual or very weird.

Round toes tend to be popular in hard times – in the 20th century they were worn in the 30s, 40s, 70s, and late 90s. They remain the most current style at the present moment, despite occasional glossy proclamations that round is over, points have failed to gain much more than a niche toehold in this century.

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Square toes occupy a bizarre middle ground. Perhaps the least anatomical of all shoe points, they seem to exist in the neither-world between the binary of round and pointed.

Henry VIII is the most famous square-toed king, and favoured a look considered sporty at the time. The blunt foot was a reaction to the Medieval popularity of super-extreme pointed shoes after they were banned by Henry IV. By the time of Good King Hal the square toe was almost as ridiculous as the preceding “Poulaine” points – “bear paws” or “bags” described shoes that could be as wide as 6″ at the toe.

The other famous square toe – the pilgrim’s buckled shoe – is a modern myth. When the Mayflower made its trans-Atlantic voyage in 1620, buckles on shoes were unknown (in London, Pepys’ diary records his own adoption of buckles in 1660) and what evidence exists of what the pilgrims wore indicates that the men wore round shoes and the women wore points.

More recently, square toes were briefly trendy in the late 1980s and early 1990s – which is where they acquired that lingering taint of distaste reserved for too-recent fads. Today, wearing square toes reveals that you are either unaware, or don’t care about fashion. They seem to be considered acceptable to wear in middle-class offices. Perhaps more so so in places like the civil service where employees are reluctant to wear their personal politics on their sleeves – or their feet.

The square toe represents equivocation or hegemony. It is a style non-statement.

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Personally, I have always worn round toes my entire life, and own just one pair of almond-shaped toes which have as much of a point as I can handle. What do you wear?