Reverie, by Hubert Denis Etcheverry, c. 1930. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Fashion

Volume VIII, Number 4 | fall 2015

Miscellany

Julius Caesar was criticized for his loosely belted toga. “Beware the badly belted boy,” said Sulla; Cicero sneered at Caesar’s habit of “trailing the fringe of the toga on the ground like an effeminate.” His political rival Cato the Younger made a point of wearing a short toga with no tunic underneath, as was considered masculine. But a decade later it was common for young Roman men to grow goatees, wear flowing togas, and use “loosely belted” as a catchphrase.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

—John Berger, 1972

Lapham’sDaily

DÉjÀ Vu

Read It and Weep

2021:

Woman creates an NFT artwork out of Instagram messages with a celebrity.

1757:

Woman creates an epistolary novel out of love letters with a nobleman.

More

The World in Time

Sonia Shah

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. More