This writer was unaware that a chic, thirtyish professional in 1959 would have worn snazzy cat’s eyes which she might have called "cheaters" but NEVER spectacles.

Such errors are more glaring in twentieth century settings because our readers are more knowledgeable about the recent past. What they don’t remember first-hand, they’ve seen on the history channel or in print. A writer is caught between the mountain-size rock of an audience that remembers a lot and the hard place of too much research to plow through to find clothing details.

The twentieth century is the most thoroughly documented, photographed, and otherwise recorded period in all of history. Literally tons of research on all the minutiae of life are available. All a writer need do is get to a library that has a vast collection of old magazines and read a few hundred of them to learn how to describe his heroine disrobing, undressing or stripping. And which to call it.

The writer must be alert to changes in the words used for garments and accessories over the years as well. When pants suspenders were called braces, what held up a man’s socks were called suspenders. The socks were called half hose. The kneepants men wore for hunting or golf were called knickers, short for Knickerbockers - and called plus-fours at another time. Boys wore them until they were old enough for long pants. In Britain, knickers have long been women’s panties.

That professional woman in 1959 felt chic in her plastic-framed, rhinestone-studded, cat’s-eye glasses and carried a handbag. Her mother wore plain spectacles in the style of her own youth and carried a pocketbook. Her grandmother’s spectacles were wire-rimmed and she remembered when purses were called reticules. The correct use of such words both enriches the texture of a story and anchors characters to their time and place.

Grooming or certain articles might be employed in the action to reveal character. A man’s choice in collars can establish his attitude. A woman obsessed with the cut of her skirt reveals her desperation to be perceived as chic. An old lady denies aging by clinging to the makeup and hairstyle of her youth. Showing such specifics tell more than telling.

Awareness of the garments and accouterments of normal wear helps the writer know what to describe as missing or wrong for the less well-dressed and the deliberate aberrations of nonconformists.

Back in the library, our writer might learn that in 1904 a glimpse of the heroine’s silk-clad limb will enflame the hero (who dare not even think it a leg), far more than her bikini-bared hips and thighs will in 1984.

Surprised? In the 20s Cole Porter observed:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking

A thrill is a thrill only so many times before we get used to it. The attraction of the forbidden dulls with overuse. The exposure of, say, an ankle will be shocking at first, then provocative, and finally prosaic. Ho hum, what else have you got that I’m not supposed to see?

Consider the now almost commonplace "thong" worn at the beach that bares the entire buttocks. What indeed, have we got left? We’ve already done topless swimsuits and entirely see-through dresses with strategically placed patches. Logic suggests a swing back to a major cover-up of the body to revive interest. But fashion rejoices in defying logic, so what comes next is anybody’s guess.

In Some Like It Hot (1959), when Marilyn Monroe climbed into that upper berth on the train, her gloriously rounded fanny filled the screen for a breathtaking moment. It was a high point of cinema that year. Grown men drooled. Today’s young people find that view repulsively fat. Skinny bottoms - and skinny everything else - became the American ideal with Bo Derek in 10 in the 70s, along with Goldie Hawn and Judy Carne in Laugh In. By the 90s such spaghetti girls were required to show muscle definition despite the perennial mantra: "You can never be too rich or too thin."

During the 40s, lingerie designers struggled to engineer brassieres with a perfect conical silhouette pointing straight out. Many bras were stitched in a tight spiral; others had panels and overlays in esoteric shapes, all designed to deny gravity. This ideal lasted well into the sixties, epitomized in the bumper of the 1955 Buick. And how about the nose cone on the 1952 Studebaker? Never underestimate the sexual connotations of the automobile.

No wonder many women in the 60s abandoned their bras altogether! As this coincided with a craze for ethnic styles in fashion, the best result was a soft, rounded bosom with liquid movement. Gone was the hard perfection of that Buick bumper.

By the way, the real irony about sex goddess Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot is that her curvaceous figure, adored in the 50s, was as unfashionable in the film’s 20s setting, as it has become since. More accurately, in Thoroughly Modern Millie, Julie Andrews fought a losing battle to compress her impressive bustline into the flat, boyish look of the time.

War always impacts fashion, as when shortages during World War II forced economy in the use of fabric. Women’s clothes blossomed with fussy little details to compensate for their minimal cut. In 1947 the restored abundance of fabric was celebrated in the long, sweeping skirts of Dior’s New Look.

First Lady Jackie Kennedy infected a whole generation with her bouffant page-boy hairstyle, pillbox hats and spare little suits. Movies like The Great Gatsby and stars like Mary Pickford and Elvis Presley inspire fads in dress, hairstyles and makeup.

Consider those little fashion rules our grandmothers lived by: "Never wear white shoes before Memorial Day or after Labor Day." Fashionable folk nowadays don’t even know about them. Popular dances relate closely to clothing styles; try to jitterbug in a hobble skirt or waltz in high heeled platform boots. Cole Porter didn’t know the half of it.