Alexandra Palmer is the fashion and costume curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and an adjunct professor in the graduate program in art history at York University and the art history department at the University of Toronto.

• IntroductionAlexandra PalmerFashion Identity 'Very Picturesque and Very Canadian': The Blanket Coat and Anglo-Canadian Identity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century - Eileen StackDressing Up: A Consuming Passion - Cynthia CooperDefrocking Dad: Masculinity and Dress in Montreal, 1700-1867 - Jan NoelThe Association of Canadian Coutouriers - Alexandra PalmerFashion, Trade, and Consumption Shop and Factory: The Ontario Millinery Trade in Transition, 1870-1930 - Tina Bates'The Work Being Chiefly Performed by Women: Female Workers in the Garment Industry in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1871 - Peter J. LarocqueThree Thousand Stitches: The Development of the Clothing Industry in Nineteenth-Century Halifax - M. Elaine MackayEnduring Roots: Gibb and Co. and the Nineteenth-Century Tailoring Trade in Montreal - Gail CariouMontreal's Fashion Mile: St Gathering Street, 1890-1930 - Elizabeth SiftonFashion and Transition Dress Reform in Nineteenth-Century Canada - Barbara E. KelceyFashion and War in Canada, 1939-1945 - Susan Turnbull CatonFashion and Refuge: The Jean Harris Salon, 1941-1961 - Lydia Ferrabee SharmanFashion and Journalism Laced in and Let Down: Women's Fashion Features in the Toronto Daily Press, 1890-1900 - Barbara M. FreemanThe Fashion of Writing, 1985-2000: Fashion-themed Televisions Impact on the Canadian Fashion Press - Deborah PulsangA Little on the Wild Side: Baton's Prestige Fashion Advertising Published in the Montreal Gazette, 1952-1972 - Katherine Bosnitch

"'This book is important, timely, and immensely relevant. Alexandra Palmer has put together a rich and varied collection that will contribute to Canadian cultural history and undoubtedly initiate further projects and debates. The content of each essay is excellent and the collection is outstanding in its complementary diversity. It moves this rapidly expanding and exciting field into the area of Canadian Studies, to which it contributes as significantly as it does to the study of dress and fashion, media studies, cultural history, and the history of consumption.' Janice Helland, Department of Art and Department of Women's Studies, Queen's University"