This approach has lead to more interesting questions such as what constitutes a fashionable silhouette, how do we name each period and provide beginning and ending dates, when does a silhouette change enough to be considered something new and separate, how much information is too much or too little. History and fashion seldom breakdown into neat packets of time. There are gaps and overlaps. There is no single system to follow that serves all needs. Often we have been confounded ourselves as we attempt to sort out how we evolved from one type of clothing into the next.
More choices sometimes means fewer choices.
We wish to help you understand not only what people wore at various points in time, but how it fits into the overall evolution of fashion and where to go for more information, both in textual and web formats. Usually it is all but impossible to exactly determine when most garments and styles begin their fashionable lives or end them. Most slowly evolve, come to prominence and then slowly fade away, replaced by the ever more fashionable. Dates and names of periods and garments are often arbitrary and never neatly connected to precise decades or even centuries. We have endeavored to find consensus among the excellent sources both in published texts and on the web.