"Fashion would seem to be one of the least important things one could imagine," writes Lars Svendsen in his book Fashion: A Philosophy. "Most clothes communicate so little," he writes, as he breaks down the commercial industry, with its irrational trend cycles, the formations of its bland identities, and the general emptiness of consumer desire. That shoppers can decide between skirt lengths or numbers of buttons "is undeniably a form of freedom," but it's "based on a choice that does not constitute any real difference. Despite this, we apparently allow ourselves to be convinced that these actually are important differences," he writes crisply.

We already knew that, but Svendsen keeps the language zesty, and he crams his ideas with many wonderful fashion facts along the way. Bringing balance to his mass-market critiques, he examines the works of avant-garde designers who don't always have to try so hard to please their customers. Take the Comme des Garçons fragrance Odeur 53—from its advertisements, it smells of "metal, cellulose, nail polish remover, burnt rubber, and other essences." Martin Margiela comes up a lot, too. There's the time he removed the catwalk and presented a line in almost total darkness. Or the looks he created by steeping garments in fertilizers, bacteria, yeast, and mold.

The best chapter is "Fashion and the Body," because it's loaded with stuff you hadn't really thought about before, like the accepted sexiness of our bones. Today, bodies with visible bones embody a popular standard of beauty, but that is "quite unique to our age... A constant feature of all ideals of beauty until the First World War was that a beautiful body had to have enough fat and muscle for skeleton to remain hidden beneath them," Svendsen writes. Other observations describe the peculiar way an era's idealized figures morph shapes throughout time. Breasts never correspond, for instance. When ample bodies were in style, their breasts were supposed to be tiny. But when slender bodies were in, the breasts suddenly had to be full. Also, "when [large] breasts are emphasized in women... the tendency has been for men's shoulders to become broader." Another passage details extreme vanity procedures from as far back as the 1950s, when some fashion models fulfilled physical standards by "removing the back molars in order to achieve hollow cheeks."

Send fashion tips to marti@thestranger.com