This is 1/2 social history and 1/2 snide commentary. I came for the social history and I enjoyed that a lot. While I've read numerous books about the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these books have been almost entirely about wars, large social upheaval, or histories of entire countries. A book focused on the more domestic side of history— and the lives that most people lived— was very welcome. Here are a few of my favorite parts:

• Learning how the federal government (particularly the Bureau of Home Economics) labored to make lives easier and healthier for Americans, including publishing sewing patterns for homemade clothing, teaching budgeting and thrift, and disseminating information about the new science of nutrition. They were particularly important during the Great Depression. Most notably, the sewing rooms were the second largest project of the New Deal's Works Project Administration next to construction. Wow!
• The Dress Doctors, a number of home economists the book often refers to en masse, emphasized that "the lines of the body are naturally beautiful and its movement naturally graceful, so any clothing that impedes that movement is, by definition, ugly." So refreshing.
• Specifics about why some elements persist in contemporary fashion, like the straight skirt (they're easier and cheaper for manufacturers, of course)
• The Biennial Dress! It was beautiful! I wish I had one.
• The author points out, on at least three separate occasions, how Dress Doctors marginalized or entirely excluded people of color. As appallingly backward as I found some parts of the book, this was an important addition
• The thoughtful commentary on how womanhood (hips and aging, especially!) has been diagnosed as a disease
• The conclusion before the afterward, which notes that "The future probably does not hold a great number of physicists who will wear elegant gowns they made themselves. The fact remains that a sewing machine can teach a girl about motors and the practical elements of electricity, belts, cams, and lubrication. And once you've used on machine, others don't intimidate you. After learning to follow sewing patterns, any blueprint is easier to read."

What I liked less:
• The numerous catty comments about contemporary dress and attitudes. Strapless wedding gowns are called oxymorons because the point of a wedding dress is to make every man in the room hope to see it fall off. A parenthetical aside notes that short-shorts reached the US in 1971 and quickly became popular among prostitutes. While intended to be amusing, these comments fell flat and won't age well.
• While I agree that history shouldn't necessarily project the values of the present on the past, I recoiled at the empathy displayed for the sexist attitude that women should be responsible for the behavior of men ("You only have to see the young Lee Remick's hourglass figure packed into a pair of skin-tight slacks in Anatomy of a Murder from 1959 to understand why the Columbia University president feared for his men's virtue."). I'm reading this to learn about the history of fashion and home economics, not to be lectured by Phyllis Schlafly.
• To the author's credit, issues like gender pay gaps and dependence on men were mentioned. Still, it felt like a very rose-tinted glasses impression of the past, and I think the book failed to convince me that there is a universal standard for "good taste"
• This comment: "The teenagers with the lowest self-esteem today are the same ones who usually shine as the academic stars of the school: Asian Americans." Eeek.

I would have liked this a lot more if all snide comments that conflated showing skin with promiscuity were removed, the first 2/3 of the book was a social history with no contemporary asides, and the last 1/3 focused on what Dress Doctor teachings we can apply in our modern lives. There's a very short list at the end and comments scattered throughout, and I think this would have worked better as a longer coherent section than as this short list and the asides.