Fashion magazines communicate nothing and empty you out—but not all fashion writing has to be "vapid, useless, wasteful, degrading," says Ali Basye, a Seattle freelance writer, editor, teacher, style forecaster, and guest of numerous radio and TV programs. Her fashion survey book The Long (and Short) of It: The Madcap History of the Skirt is a complicated terrain. The text asserts a singsongy tone, chipper and brimming with ad-copy nuances, though many stories are casually blood-seeped, engaging something amusing and horrifying at the same time.

One chapter describes the hobble skirt, from a hundred years ago, named for its "shackling effect that literally hobbled the women wearing them." Its silhouette was billowy and strange, "bound tightly at shins and waist but full at the thighs." Screwed by fate, one woman was trampled to death in the dirty streets as she struggled to avoid a running horse, while stairs and cars would victimize others, and "several more deaths followed over the years." Though they were ridiculed for wearing them, "the women couldn't give a fuck," says Ali, and the skirts stayed popular for five years. (Is this real? There is nothing to do but stare at the words on the page. They stare right back at you.)

A more inspiring segment comes from the legend of Spanish queen Marguerite de Valois, nicknamed "The Queen of Hearts"—though it turned out to be just a bullshit story Oscar Wilde made up, Ali says, and people continue to believe it's true. The legend describes the "thirty-four pockets she supposedly sewed into the lining of her gargantuan hoopskirt." Those "macabre pockets... held the embalmed hearts of her thirty-four successive sweethearts, with each heart sealed in a separate box."

Makeup trends drift through passages of the book, too. Flappers powdered and blushed their kneecaps. Eighteenth-century Europeans traced dark circles under the eyes, using blue shadow. (They also wore dresses "with sleeves set so low... they couldn't possibly lift their arms above their heads.") Two hundred years earlier, women caked their faces with mercury paste, inviting a free fall of smeary wads and death: "How distressing it must have been to continually mask pus-filled open sores and the large, rotting gray patches that kept appearing from this mixture."

Attention, makers of fashion and workers of garmentry: Tell me what you're doing at mjonjak@thestranger.com.