Dress for Success in This Quiz on Women's Fashion

In the early 19th century, dresses became larger and brighter, with bell-shaped skirts and huge puffed sleeves. These sleeves became known as "leg-of-mutton sleeves," due to their resemblance to the cut of meat. They were stuffed and wired to keep their impressive shape, creating a striking, if impractical, silhouette.

Over the centuries, women have worn a variety of different undergarments, from hoops to crinolines, to create fuller skirts. Bustles emerged in the 1870s to add fullness and structure to the posterior, and helped to create the popular Gilded Age "s-shape" silhouette.

In the 1850s, women began to adopt the Turkish style of wearing long trousers underneath their skirts. The look was popularized (and got its name) after women's rights activist Amelia Bloomer began sporting them. The wearing of trousers cinched at the ankle enabled women to take part in athletic activities such as cycling.

Louis Réard introduced the skimpy two-piece bathing suit known as a bikini (named for the atomic tests at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific) in 1946. He unveiled the look at a fashionable Parisian swimming pool, choosing showgirl Micheline Bernardini to model the garment. Young Europeans immediately took to the bikini, but it didn't find a home on the more conservative U.S. beaches until the 1960s.

Picture the characters in a Jane Austen novel, and they're probably wearing empire-line dresses with the waist cinched high under the bust. This style of dress originated in France and came into fashion after the French Revolution (1789-99), when Napoleon I became emperor. Influenced by Greco-Roman art, empire-line dresses were made from cool, loose fabrics and were often white in color.

The "Swinging London" movement of the 1960s represented a cultural shift toward more youthful trends in music, art, and fashion. British designer Mary Quant was a big part of that cultural movement; along with other designers such as André Courrèges, she helped popularize miniskirts and minidresses. As the decade progressed, skirts became shorter and shorter to appeal to young people desiring greater freedom of movement and more fun from their fashion.

French designer Christian Dior launched his influential "New Look" in 1947. After years of austerity during WWII, this new, opulent silhouette — with a cinched waist, full skirt, and fitted jacket — reignited women's fashion. The most iconic outfit in Dior's "New Look" was the "Bar Suit," which featured a cream-colored jacket with narrow shoulders and a tiny waist, worn with a voluminous black midi skirt.

In the 1980s, as more and more women joined the workforce, a new style of business wear came to the fore. "Power dressing" invoked a traditionally masculine silhouette with boxy suits and wide shoulders (courtesy of shoulder pads), often accessorized with red lipstick, costume jewelry, or silk scarves. The look was epitomized by Melanie Griffith in the 1988 movie "Working Girl."

In 1926, "Vogue" published an illustration of a simple, long-sleeved black dress in crêpe de Chine — and a fashion icon was born. The magazine dubbed the Coco Chanel-designed dress "Chanel's Ford" and predicted it would become a staple for women of all classes, everywhere. Their prediction proved correct, and the "little black dress," as it came to be known, has been a wardrobe must-have ever since.

The corset was an essential part of a woman's wardrobe from the 16th century until the early 20th century. The first corsets were stiffened with baleen, a keratinous substance found in the jaws of baleen whales, and were designed to give women an idealized shape with a small waist and ample bosom. Often uncomfortable and restrictive, they finally fell from fashion after World War I.