"Bags help them suss out who's their kind of person and who's not," the fashion historian Valerie Steele tells the author.

He was also an important and pioneering fashion historian described as "the man in England who made the study of costume respectable".

Every fashion historian has a guess about where Dior would have taken his silhouette had he not died.

Some fashion historians say that the end of a century summarizes and refines all its styles.

"In some ways you can trace the culture through its taste in women's undergarments," the fashion historian Valerie Steele said.

I phoned a fashion historian, ostensibly to learn the answer to that question.

It is always on the move, and the fashion historian must be too; one of the Anne Hollanders who wrote this book is.

As the fashion historian James Laver once said about clothing, it's "nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible."

Joan Broster, the fashion historian who collected South African clothes, was a pioneer in the field.

The pictures package nostalgia in series and offer a fashion historian a miniature history of some 50 years of American styles.