Grosvenor and Burke suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about the world. It can help to manufacture rote obedience or independent activity; it can create high self-confidence or low self-esteem.

But I think that sometimes, when one's behaved like a rather second-rate person, the way I did at breakfast, then in a kind of self-destructive shock one goes and does something really second-rate. Almost as if to prove it.

The fashion industry is no more able to preserve a style that men and women have decided to abandon than to introduce one they do not choose to accept.

Attempts to limit female mobility by hampering locomotion are ancient and almost universal. The foot-binding of upper-class Chinese girls and the Nigerian custom of loading women's legs with pounds of heavy brass wire are extreme examples, but all over the world similar stratagems have been employed to make sure that once you have caught a woman she cannot run away, and even if she stays around she cannot keep up with you. ... Literally as well as figuratively modern women's shoes are what keeps Samantha from running as fast as Sammy.

We all want to be guilty, because guilt is power.

the fashion pages of magazines such as Cosmopolitan now seem to specialize in telling the career girl what to wear to charm the particular wrong type of man who reads Playboy, while the editorial pages tell her how to cope with the resulting psychic damage.

Fashion is free speech, and one of the privileges, if not always one of the pleasures, of a free world