Quotes from Virginia Postrel

The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.

A standard 'well woman' checkup can last as little as 10 minutes, hardly time for any in-depth discussions.

Standardized sizes made inexpensive, off-the-rack garments economically feasible. They gave shoppers a reliable guide to finding clothes in self-service shops.

At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.

Design is not style. It's not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing.

With some exceptions, the enemies of the future aim their attacks not at creativity itself but at the dynamic processes through which it is carried.

Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered.

Functionality still matters, of course. But competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance, as traditionally defined. In a crowded marketplace, aesthetics is often the only way to make a product stand out.

My dear daughter—I have for some time had hope of seeing you once more in this world, but now that hope is entirely gone forever," wrote Phebe Brownrigg to her free daughter Amy Nixon, shortly before her owner took her from North Carolina to Mississippi in 1835. One of the rare letters written by a western-bound slave on her own behalf, it concluded, "May we all meet around our Father's throne in heaven, never no more to depart.

The cultural authenticity of cloth arises not from the purity of its origins but from the ways in which individuals and groups turn textiles to their own purposes. Consumers, not producers, determine the meaning and value of textiles.

The future we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, like all futures left to themselves, "emergent, complex messiness." Its "messiness" lies not in disorder, but in an order that is unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever shifting, a pattern created by millions of uncoordinated, independent decisions.

Sacchetti ends his story with a popular saying: "What woman wants the Lord wants, and what the Lord wants comes to pass."24

This rare expertise was hard to duplicate, making the maestre sought-after employees who commanded higher wages than male laborers.

As he seeks to improve Under Armour materials, Blakely increasingly focuses on the earliest stages of the manufacturing process. Starting early provides more possible ways to add features. To develop a cooling fabric, for instance, the company worked with an Asian supplier to develop a yarn whose cross section maximized its surface area. It then infused the material with titanium dioxide, whose presence makes people exercising in hot, humid environments feel cooler.16 Under Armour

To reverse Arthur C. Clarke's famous adage about magic, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature.

A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture.

The Internet ethos of diversity and competition runs exactly counter to uniform, gatekeeper-oriented medical culture - the technocratic philosophy of the 'one best way' embodied in our pharmaceutical regulations. On the Net, medical information is abundant, and pharmacies, domestic and foreign, operate on many different models.

Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from which deviations seem like flaws. There's nothing like a trip to the dressing room to convince a woman - fat, thin, or in between - that she's a freak.

Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery - the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work.

Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees.

Grassroots techies - the mostly unknown people who write code and start companies that don't make the headlines - hate, loathe, and despise Microsoft. At technology conferences, it is the devil, or the guaranteed laugh line. Its products are mocked, its business practices booed.

Scientists appear most often in horror movies. Through childlike curiosity or God-defying hubris, they unleash destructive forces they can't control - 'Forbidden Planet's Monsters of the Id.

Like Disneyland, luxury retailers have long had to figure out how to overcome customers' natural inertia. Unlike less pricey stores, they tend not to attract idle browsers who make impulse purchases.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.