Excellent article. I loved the illustrations!

On the subject of women's clothing, you may be interested in the work of Thorstein Veblen (an economist noted for coining the term 'conspicuous consumption'). He posit'd that clothing and that chimera we call 'fashion' (at least during the Victorian era) was specifically designed to convey wealth and had a distinct lack of utility: to signal to others the lack of need to engage in manual labor.

Particular to the instance of women's dress, however, clothing was designed not just to be uncomfortable, but actively worked against utility: to bind the female with corsets, heels, hoop skirts, etc...

He said that not only were these metaphors for the relationship between the sexes, they were also ways of actually creating, in Veblen's word, the 'ineptitude' of the female. Veblen was one of the first to suggest that clothing not only signalled but maybe had much to do with creating and propagating the myth that females were more frail than men.