The symmetry is to die for. Among this year’s must-have travel accessories is an upscale tote bag from The Bay, a leather-trimmed carry-all made of richly finished white wool, with a border of austere, familiar coloured stripes. That this singularly fab item tugs at the memory as well as the wallet is no wonder, since the bag is made from the most storied item in the history of Canadian accoutrement: the Hudson’s Bay blanket.

The blanket is back, after having started this nation’s passion for fashion in the first place. As the initial essay in Fashion: A Canadian Perspective notes, the first Canadian garment with any real claim to iconic status was made from Hudson’s Bay wool. The blanket coat was a sort of hooded, striped moveable tent that voyageurs, First Nations traders, and various Upper Canada sod haulers donned as they went about the business of building a new nation.

From the coat to the bag, Canadian fashion can be said to be more than 200 years of age. But as editor Alexandra Palmer notes in her introduction, “The history of Canadian dress has received extremely little academic attention and is still in its infancy.” By way of addressing this information shortfall, Palmer’s accessibly academic tome has a number of issues up its sleeve: What has Canada contributed to the world of fashion, both domestically and abroad? What kinds of social, cultural, economic, gender, and labour factors lie behind, say, a cummerbund, or a bustle, or a thong? How did we get from bloomers to Roots?

Palmer, curator of fashion costumes at the Royal Ontario Museum, has arranged the book in four sections – “Fashion Identity,” “Fashion, Trade, and Consumption,” “Fashion and Transition,” and “Fashion and Journalism” – each of which features three or more essays. The essays examine some of the more colourful threads in Canadian fashion history, and their broader societal implications.

Thus there are discussions of the Second World War and its impact on the apparel industry (production lines were curtailed, so a whole generation of women learned to sew); marketers and marketing; notable individuals, including the English-born couturier Jane Harris, who brought Pucci and Balmain to Canada after the war; labour practices; and fashion trends – such as Eaton’s best-sellers of 1920, the “Bob-o-link – the New Hats for Bobbed Hair.”

Among the collection’s standout pieces are Barbara M. Freeman’s examination of women’s emancipation and the stresses and strains it placed on early fashion journalism. Also excellent is Cynthia Cooper’s “‘Dressing Up’: A Consuming Passion,” with its rich and strange photo gallery of 19th-century Montreal grandees dressed up in their party wigs and breeches. The book ends with Deborah Fulsang’s intriguing essay on the global importance of City TV’s Fashion Television. Even if you can’t stand Jeanne Beker, the show’s bubbly host, it has to be acknowledged that in true McLuhanesque style, Canada enriched the history of clothing by dreaming up a new way of looking at it.

Fashion: A Canadian Perspective is probably not intended for the casual fashionista, packed as it is with un-glossy statistical data and other academic minutia. Nevertheless, the book will interest amateur historians, fans of fashion’s obscure crannies, and anyone who can see human dreams in dusty order books and advertisements for “Rigby’s Rainproof Bicycle Suits.”

Interestingly, the book suffers from the same problem of so much other work on our nation: the West is almost totally unrepresented. This is probably due to a lack of historical material in the rough-hewn, less old-monied sections of the country. Given this problem (or opportunity), Palmer could have thrown caution to the wind. She could have dropped the formality and let Westerners express their true fashion voice: the way of the dude.

For example, a Couplandesque look at Vancouver in the 1970s cries out to be written, Heart t-shirts and all. This was a bifurcated world consisting of mums (who shopped at the now-defunct Woodwards department store) and kids (Bootlegger jeans). Woodwards all too regularly sponsored radio jingles that trilled “Woodward’s is a nice department store!,” which captured Vancouver’s still-Brit civic spirit perfectly. Meanwhile, on planet Youth, a fashion rumour swept our high school like wildfire: the longer you wore Bootlegger cords, the more they smelled like hash.