When Oprah Winfrey appeared at the Oscars this month wearing a tie, a historically masculine accessory that women have been enthusiastically co-opting, a subtle yet meaningful Rubicon was crossed.

“Men’s fashion was systematized a century earlier than women’s,” Carlson pointed out. With no tradition for women’s pockets, they were left out; instead handbags emerged as an entire ...

John James Audubon, the pre-eminent 19th-century painter of birds ... when fashionable women began wearing hats adorned with feathers, wings and even entire taxidermied birds.