on I Love Typography:

Fashion is a global, multi-billion dollar industry. From haute couture to $5 tees, it is inescapable — at least for those of us who wear clothes, that is.

It is supported and promoted by vast publishing enterprises of glossy magazines and books and million-dollar advertising budgets. And although, arguably, we might say that fashion got its start when humans began wearing clothes 170,000 years ago, fashion as an industry was only really possible after the Industrial Revolution.

But centuries before Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, and long before the first fashion shows of the late nineteenth century, we find seeds of an industry in the very first fashion publications.