“Most women view with regret the evidently numbered days of the large sleeve,” the New York Times reported in February 1896. “In its most exaggerated form it has been an admitted target for the pencil and pen of the caricaturist, and its voluminous climax has not been sanctioned by the best taste at any time.” Called up from the past courtesy the Gray Lady’s TimesMachine, this unbylined obituary makes the heart I wear on my obsolescing dirigible of a sleeve sink with dread. With Bella Baxter–gauge brachia ballooning everywhere of late, from the Oscars to ASOS, it’s only a matter of time before fashion’s pendulum swings from pensile and protuberant mannerism to a deflationary functionalism of caps, straps, and tubes. Indeed, the curatorial attention recently lavished upon the so-called statement sleeve at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology suggests its present incarnation may soon pass into history.
But fellow partisans of the pouf needn’t despair. As the recursive abundance on view at FIT also attested, everything old is new again. In the 1830s, when (…