From Marie Antoinette’s pouf to hipsters’ skinny jeans and everything in between, Jennifer Croll’s Fashion That Changed the World (Prestel) is the rare style-history book that surveys why we wear what we do, right up to modern times.

Broken up into chapters on subjects such as couture, music, feminism, and magazines, and boasting a parade of famous photos, the Vancouver writer’s book hits all the fun fashion highlights of the past century or two. The cover features that iconic image of a bejewelled Audrey Hepburn, long cigarette holder clenched between her teeth, in full Breakfast at Tiffany’s mode. Yes, Kate, Brooke, Anna, Twiggy, Madonna, and Coco are there too, as are the cultural histories behind landmark looks like the Mondrian dress, Chanel suits, flapper dresses, steampunk, zoot suits, Calvin Klein jeans, punk-rock leathers, grunge plaids, and—hello, Vancouver!—lululemon.

If any overriding message came out of the mountain of research that Croll put into the book, it’s that there’s nothing new in the world of fashion. Or, at least, everything old is new again.

“You think a certain trend is from a certain decade, but it could have gone way back,” Croll says, looking chic in head-to-toe black, sitting in a Railtown coffee shop near the publishing house where she works as an editor. As an example, she points to Britain’s sharp-dressed Teddy boys, the mid-’50s working-class dandies who adopted the drainpipe trousers, vests, and velvet collars their own grandfathers might have worn at the end of the previous century. “At the time it was very retro, and it derived from the Edwardian, then it developed into the hippie/beatnik look as well. And I think the hipsters dress now like the Edwardians. So people think today they’re dressing like someone from the ’60s, but really they’re dressing like someone from the 1890s.”

Croll (a Straight contributor) spent the past year diving into books, periodicals, archives, and museum shows in search of the stories behind clothes that signified political change.

Although her book gives a brief nod to royals like Marie Antoinette and Elizabeth I, Fashion That Changed the World shows it was more recent that apparel became more important as cultural expression. “Clothing took on a lot more meaning with the Industrial Revolution,” Croll says.

What struck her was how rapidly things changed from that period to today, compared to centuries of people dressing purely for necessity. And she was blown away by how much mass production, which kicked into high gear in the 1970s, affected what people wore.

“In the 1920s, women would order dresses out of the Sears catalogue—say, three dresses—and when you convert what they spent, it would be around $200 a dress,” Croll explains. “But they wouldn’t have been buying anything else. And these were not people of big means. Now that we have this system where a lot of our clothes are produced in poor countries, people think that clothes cost a lot less [to make] than they actually do.”

Her book covers many fascinating eras of change, from the reign of supermodels to the rise of ethical fashion, but Croll admits her favourite revolutionary period might be the 1960s, which recur throughout the book in chapters about everything from music to feminism. “That was an era of really rapid change in fashion, and the beginning of ready-to-wear. Up till then, there was no real youth fashion. You’d go from dressing like a little kid to dressing like an adult.”

Fashion That Changed the World makes it clear that an even bigger revolution may be happening right now. A chapter on the Internet and blogging tracks a sea change. “That’s hugely changing how we dress and how we consume fashion and the rise of street fashion as something we aspire to. It marks even more democratization of fashion.”

In fact, a decade from now, Croll will probably be able to devote another entire cultural history to it. For now, though, she’s busy enough: she just helped launch Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press), to which she contributed, an anthology of personal essays, photos, and more that tracks the reasons why women dress the way they do. As for Fashion That Changed the World, which will be published in the U.K., Germany, and the U.S., it launches here on October 22. It appears that, as fashion changes at a rate faster than perhaps any other century has seen, one thing remains constant: readers’ appetite for books about it.