... quote from your book, "One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth."

Yes, right.

Cosimo de' Medici, the, um, great patriarch of Florence during the Renaissance, said this, and it reflected the idea a- and an anxiety that, um, people were dressing above their station, and that in a society where a lot was communicated visually, um, the ability to look like an aristocrat, to look like a gentleman, often was all there was to it.

And so there was a worry about changing social hierarchy and the power of fashion to affect those social hierarchies.

The, um...

You were asking about the research process, and I mean, it's the most fun I've had doing any writing project.

Uh, but I spent a lot of time digging through, um, history articles, uh, uh, and, and books, and going into archives, trying to find examples of legal rules around clothing, uh, you know, 'cause I thought, "Well, I'm a lawyer, and the way I can get at this is by looking at what laws were in place at the time." And I guess what surprised me is how many of them there were.

So between the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, have, has the changed these, these laws, or what cha- like what was different in the, in those previous centuries?