While this book focuses on the professional and creative processes of seamstresses, due to the message-laden content of clothing, the predominant voice of fashion must not be excluded from the dialogue. Although fashion has remained a topic of discord for a slew of theorists with conflicting viewpoints, what can be agreed upon is that clothing does not merely meet a basic human need by protecting us from natural elements. Garments possess more than a functional role in our everyday lives no matter how much we resist. Though anxieties over the appropriate clothing for an occasion may resonate for a majority of our lived, shared social experiences, even “comfort clothing” bears fashionable identity codes. Svendsen denies that one may decide or chose to exist outside of fashion's domain: “To be excluded from the game, and aware of being excluded, is to be within its sphere” (20). Our inability to escape these cultural messages and markers confirms how fashion has cast its net far and wide, seeping into almost every aspect of our public and private identities and experiences.

When approaching the interpretation of fashion in contemporary times, rapid changes result in a maddening conundrum. In the face of irrational changes, Svendsen cautions against misinterpreting history by linking fashion trends and societal change, a practice that does not always translate into direct cause-and-effect: “If skirts are longer for a season, it is not because society has become more puritanical, but because they have been shorter. In short: fashion develops more on the basis of internal conditions than a dialogue with the political developments in society” (29).