Early next week, according to a D.H.S. official, the Trump Administration is expected to announce a major immigration deal, known as a safe-third-country agreement, with Guatemala. For weeks, there have been reports that negotiations were under way between the two countries, but, until now, none of the details were official. According to a draft of the agreement, which The New Yorker has obtained, asylum seekers from any country who either show up at U.S. ports of entry or are apprehended while crossing between ports of entry could be sent to seek asylum in Guatemala instead. During the past year, tens of thousands of migrants, the vast majority of them from Central America, have arrived at the U.S. border seeking asylum each month. By law, the U.S. must give them a chance to bring their claims before authorities, even though there’s currently a backlog in the immigration courts of roughly a million cases. The Trump Administration has tried a number of measures to prevent asylum seekers from entering the country—from “metering” at ports of entry to forcing people to wait in Mexico—but, in every case, international obligations held that the U.S. would eventually have to hear their asylum claims. Under this new arrangement, most of these migrants will no longer have a chance to make an asylum claim in the U.S. at all. “We’re talking about something much bigger than what the term ‘safe third country’ implies,” someone with knowledge of the deal told me. “We’re talking about a kind of transfer agreement where the U.S. can send any asylum seekers, not just Central Americans, to Guatemala.”

From the start of the Trump Presidency, Administration officials have been fixated on a safe-third-country policy with Mexico—a similar accord already exists with Canada—since it would allow the U.S. government to shift the burden of handling asylum claims farther south. The principle was that migrants wouldn’t have to apply for asylum in the U.S. because they could do so elsewhere along the way. But immigrants-rights advocates and policy experts pointed out that Mexico’s legal system could not credibly take on that responsibility. “If you’re going to pursue a safe-third-country agreement, you have to be able to say ‘safe’ with a straight face,” Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told me. Until very recently, the prospect of such an agreement—not just with Mexico but with any other country in Central America—seemed far-fetched. Yet last month, under the threat of steep tariffs on Mexican goods, Trump strong-armed the Mexican government into considering it. Even so, according to a former Mexican official, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is stalling. “They are trying to fight this,” the former official said. What’s so striking about the agreement with Guatemala, however, is that it goes even further than the terms the U.S. sought in its dealings with Mexico. “This is a whole new level,” the person with knowledge of the agreement told me. “In my read, it looks like even those who have never set foot in Guatemala can potentially be sent there.”

At this point, there are still more questions than answers about what the agreement with Guatemala will mean in practice. A lot will still have to happen before it goes into force, and the terms aren’t final. The draft of the agreement doesn’t provide much clarity on how it will be implemented—another person with knowledge of the agreement said, “this reads like it was drafted by someone’s intern”—but it does offer an exemption for Guatemalan migrants, which might be why the government of Jimmy Morales, a U.S. ally, seems willing to sign on. Guatemala is currently in the midst of Presidential elections; next month, the country will hold a runoff between two candidates, and the current front-runner has been opposed to this type of deal. The Morales government, however, still has six months left in office. A U.N.-backed anti-corruption body called the CICIG, which, for years, was funded by the U.S. and admired throughout the region, is being dismantled by Morales, whose own family has fallen under investigation for graft and financial improprieties. Signing an immigration deal “would get the Guatemalan government in the U.S.’s good graces,” Stephen McFarland, a former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, told me. “The question is, what would they intend to use that status for?” Earlier this week, after Morales announced that he would be meeting with Trump in Washington on Monday, three former foreign ministers of Guatemala petitioned the country’s Constitutional Court to block him from signing the agreement. Doing so, they said, “would allow the current president of the republic to leave the future of our country mortgaged, without any responsibility.”

The biggest, and most unsettling, question raised by the agreement is how Guatemala could possibly cope with such enormous demands. More people are leaving Guatemala now than any other country in the northern triangle of Central America. Rampant poverty, entrenched political corruption, urban crime, and the effects of climate change have made large swaths of the country virtually uninhabitable. “This is already a country in which the political and economic system can’t provide jobs for all its people,” McFarland said. “There are all these people, their own citizens, that the government and the political and economic system are not taking care of. To get thousands of citizens from other countries to come in there, and to take care of them for an indefinite period of time, would be very difficult.” Although the U.S. would provide additional aid to help the Guatemalan government address the influx of asylum seekers, it isn’t clear whether the country has the administrative capacity to take on the job. According to the person familiar with the safe-third-country agreement, “U.N.H.C.R. [the U.N.’s refugee agency] has not been involved” in the current negotiations. And, for Central Americans transferred to Guatemala under the terms of the deal, there’s an added security risk: many of the gangs Salvadorans and Hondurans are fleeing also operate in Guatemala.

In recent months, the squalid conditions at borderland detention centers have provoked broad political outcry in the U.S. At the same time, a worsening asylum crisis has been playing out south of the U.S. border, beyond the immediate notice of concerned Americans. There, the Trump Administration is quietly delivering on its promise to redraw American asylum practice. Since January, under a policy called the Migration Protection Protocols (M.P.P.), the U.S. government has sent more than fifteen thousand asylum seekers to Mexico, where they now must wait indefinitely as their cases inch through the backlogged American immigration courts. Cities in northern Mexico, such as Tijuana and Juarez, are filling up with desperate migrants who are exposed to violent crime, extortions, and kidnappings, all of which are on the rise.This week, as part of the M.P.P., the U.S. began sending migrants to Tamaulipas, one of Mexico’s most violent states and a stronghold for drug cartels that, for years, have brutalized migrants for money and for sport.

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Safe-third-country agreements are notoriously difficult to enforce. The logistics are complex, and the outcomes tend not to change the harried calculations of asylum seekers as they flee their homes. These agreements, according to a recent study by the Migration Policy Institute, are “unlikely to hold the key to solving the crisis unfolding at the U.S. southern border.” The Trump Administration has already cut aid to Central America, and the U.S. asylum system remains in dire need of improvement. But there’s also little question that the agreement with Guatemala will reduce the number of people who reach, and remain in, the U.S. If the President has made the asylum crisis worse, he’ll also be able to say he’s improving it—just as he can claim credit for the decline in the number of apprehensions at the U.S. border last month. That was the result of increased enforcement efforts by the Mexican government acting under U.S. pressure.

There’s also no reason to expect that the Trump Administration will abandon its efforts to force the Mexicans into a safe-third-country agreement, as well. “The Mexican government thought that the possibility of a safe-third-country agreement with Guatemala had fallen apart because of the elections there,” the former Mexican official told me. “The recent news caught top Mexican officials by surprise.” In the next month, the two countries will continue immigration talks, and, again, Mexico will face mounting pressure to accede to American demands. “The U.S. has used the agreement with Guatemala to convince the Mexicans to sign their own safe-third-country agreement,” the former official said. “Its argument is that the number of migrants Mexico will receive will be lower now.”

Crises make and break historical reputations. In our current constitutional emergency, a few unlikely figures, above all the former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have upheld the rule of law, possibly redeeming their places in history. Many others, above all the current Attorney General, William Barr, seem determined to irretrievably sink theirs. Now the reputation at risk is that of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

With regard to the debate over the proper response to Donald Trump’s brazen deeds, Pelosi has not taken impeachment off the table, saying, “I don’t think you should impeach for political reasons, and I don’t think you should not impeach for political reasons.” Yet political reasons seem to be preventing her from pursuing constitutional concerns. Her reasoning is clear: if the House were to launch an impeachment without “overwhelming” evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors and strong bipartisan public support, Trump’s inevitable acquittal in the Republican-controlled Senate would only strengthen him, and he could cruise to reëlection. But, in this instance, Pelosi’s normally acute political judgment is failing her, and the historical precedent she is evidently relying on—the impeachment of President Bill Clinton—is not analogous. In fact, based on the past half century of political history, suppressing an impeachment inquiry seems more likely to help insure Trump’s reëlection. If this happens, Pelosi’s formidable reputation, based on a lifetime of public service and her role as the first female Speaker of the House, will suffer.

The basic historical error behind suppressing an impeachment inquiry confuses the genuine crisis surrounding Trump with the manufactured one that engulfed Clinton. In 1998, the House Republicans, lacking public support and all but assured that the Senate, though it was controlled by their own party, would not convict Clinton, impeached him anyway, which only served to win him sympathy and drive up his popularity ratings. Pelosi apparently sees the same thing happening now, but the two cases are very different.

When the scandal involving Clinton and Monica Lewinsky broke, in January of 1998, Republicans had been pursuing both Bill and Hillary Clinton for more than five years, and they had come up with nothing. In the view of most Americans, the Lewinsky story, although pathetic and unnerving, never amounted to a case sufficient to justify Clinton’s removal from office, even when attached to Clinton’s dissembling under oath about the matter. Moreover, Clinton, unlike Trump, was a broadly popular President: when the scandal broke, his approval rating hovered around sixty-six per cent; on the day he was impeached, it rose to seventy-three per cent; the week after his acquittal, it was the same as it had been at the beginning: sixty-six per cent.

Trump, by contrast, is the least popular President of the postwar period, who enjoys a fiercely loyal base but so far has failed to win the support of more than half those Americans polled. More important, the evidence presented in the Mueller report—regarding Trump’s campaign’s expectation that it could benefit from Russian interference and hacking efforts, and numerous contacts with Russians, as well as the President’s subsequent attempts to obstruct justice—is formidable, if, in Mueller’s view, insufficient to “establish” that members of the Trump campaign actually conspired or coördinated with Russia. (The insufficiency, of course, may have been due to the efforts at obstruction that the report describes.) Despite Barr’s efforts to obscure the fact that Mueller’s report does not exonerate the President, only thirty-three per cent of Americans, according to a Quinnipiac poll, believe that the Attorney General has accurately represented the report’s conclusions. That number may fall further after Mueller’s testimony before Congress, which is scheduled for next week.

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The more relevant historical analogy to Trump’s situation is that of President Richard M. Nixon, during the last two years of his Administration. Nixon won reëlection in a historic landslide in 1972, but his public standing eroded during the summer of 1973, when the televised Senate hearings chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, Democrat of North Carolina, began to reveal the extent and the seriousness of the Watergate crimes. Even so, at the start of 1974, less than thirty-eight per cent of the public were in favor of removing the President from office, and support for Nixon among Capitol Hill Republicans remained strong. A major reason for Nixon’s continued support was the effectiveness of his Administration’s stonewalling strategy of denial and redaction—the same strategy that the Trump Administration has pursued in fighting subpoenas from several current House committees. (On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee voted to issue subpoenas to a dozen people associated with the White House, including Sessions and Jared Kushner.) Still, support for Trump’s impeachment stands at forty-five per cent, according to a June Gallup Poll.

In 1974, the Democrats did not flinch. Based on what was known after the Ervin Committee inquiries—which was nowhere near as conclusive as the evidence amassed against Trump by Robert Mueller—the House Judiciary Committee authorized its chairman, Representative Peter Rodino, of New Jersey, to undertake an impeachment inquiry. That inquiry, alongside the continuing work of the special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, produced the evidence and sustained hearings that decisively turned public opinion—and led to Nixon’s resignation.

In short: Nixon, a popular President who retained public support, finally succumbed to powerful charges once the House fulfilled its constitutional duty. Yet now an unpopular President may get away with acts at least as grievous as Nixon’s because the House will have evaded its constitutional duty. The blame for that evasion would fall on Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi, more surprisingly, is also ignoring the chief political lesson of the Nixon impeachment. The case against authorizing an impeachment inquiry rests in part on polling, which shows that the public over all remains unconvinced that an impeachment inquiry is warranted—though the number in favor keeps growing. Yet had the House Democratic leadership come to the same conclusion in early 1974—when, it needs remembering, public support for impeachment was actually weaker—Nixon would have finished out his second term. The lesson is simple: on matters as serious as a Presidential impeachment, the opposition must lead, not follow, public opinion; it must examine and develop the evidence in plain view, and not permit the White House to persist in shaping perceptions through concealment and lies.

Another lesson follows from this one. Asserting that a Senate acquittal would allow Trump to claim vindication elides the fact Trump has already claimed vindication, a falsehood which the Democrats’ failure to pursue impeachment would only strengthen. It also overlooks how a Senate trial always reinforces either the severity of the alleged crimes and the persuasiveness of the evidence, or the lack thereof. Nixon resigned only when Senate Republicans told him that his case would not survive a trial. Trump’s domination of the G.O.P. does make it all but impossible that the Senate would vote to remove him. But evidence presented by the House impeachment managers would enrage independents as well as Democrats, on the eve of the election, putting pressure on vulnerable Senate Republicans as well as on Trump. The electorate would, in effect, do the job that the Senate refused to do.

Pelosi, viewing the House and Senate proceedings narrowly, argues that Trump is best contested not with impeachment, which would be divisive, but by replaying the kitchen-table issues that won the Democrats the House majority in 2018—health care, immigration, and climate change. But that strategy would commit the classic military blunder of fighting a war on the basis of the last successful campaign, regardless of the facts and context. It’s one thing to defeat Republicans in congressional races in which Trump’s name does not appear on the ballot. It’s quite another to defeat them when the charismatic Trump heads the ticket and is able to claim that he is exonerated because Democrats did not pursue an impeachment inquiry. In any event, the campaign so far has showcased that Democrats are far from united on a number of kitchen-table issues, from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal.

It’s hard to think of an electorate in modern times any more split than the one that exists today, which Trump is powerfully dividing, on his own anti-liberal terms. Pursuing a fully justified impeachment inquiry, however, would turn Trump’s demagogy against him. It would reframe the division on constitutional terms, not with empty insults but with hard evidence, televised daily—the kind of evidence that could turn crucial independent opinion and energize a Democratic base. The principal issue that truly unites and mobilizes the fractured Democrats, and with them a majority of Independents, is the clear and present danger of Donald J. Trump. To this extent, Trump’s narcissism has succeeded in making American politics revolve around him—but to deny that reality will only perpetuate it and enable him politically. To expose his actions in detail, however, starting with his manifest failure to defend the national security against continuing Russian cyberattacks and Putin’s open support for the evisceration of “obsolete” Western liberal democracy, would put the matter differently—and put him on the defensive.

Such proceedings would also accentuate the now-or-never importance of the 2020 election. Think of Trump in a second term, backed by a compliant Supreme Court, bolstered by a Senate perhaps still led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and guided by an Attorney General set on realizing the dream of a “unitary executive.” The recent Supreme Court ruling giving license to the wholesale gerrymandering of congressional districts, along with Trump’s defiant order to include a citizenship question in the census, are just two indications of where we would be headed.

On May 19th, Nancy Pelosi was the recipient of the Profile in Courage Award, bestowed by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. She was rightly given the prize for her advocacy of the Affordable Care Act, the basis of a universal health-care system, which took decades of struggle to enact, and which she defended to help win a Democratic majority of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. The history of the Congress has been filled with profiles in courage, including, in recent times, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, standing to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy; Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, conducting hearings on the Vietnam War, despite his friendship with President Lyndon Johnson; and Senator Barry Goldwater, Republican of Arizona, telling President Richard Nixon that he must resign or face removal from office.

Nancy Pelosi knows that history. In accepting her Profile in Courage Award, she said, “In my public life, I have seen leaders who understood that their duty was not to do what was easy but what was right.” She added, “In the darkest hours of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine wrote, ‘The times have found us’ . . . and today the times have found us to strengthen America. It is not about politics but about patriotism.” The choice is hers. More than her reputation rests on it.

On Sunday, September 10, 1978, Jim Bouton took the mound for the Atlanta Braves against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Bouton was thirty-nine years old and hadn’t pitched in the majors in eight seasons. He was, by that point, more famous as the author of the best-selling memoir “Ball Four,” which tracks Bouton’s season knuckleballing for the expansion Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros, than he was as a player; his start for the Braves was mostly seen as a publicity stunt arranged by the team’s young owner, Ted Turner. Bouton retired the first three batters in order and ran to the dugout in jubilation. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported it the next day, he “raised his arms over his head and waved them in victory as Richard Nixon did.” When he went back to the mound, he returned to Earth, allowing six runs over the next four innings—his knuckleball, which he’d developed a decade earlier, in a previous attempt to revive his career, and which he’d nicknamed “superknuck,” amused more Dodgers than it baffled. His teammates, meanwhile, were less amused. “I don’t think he should be too pleased with today,” one of them said afterward.

It was a typical response to Bouton, who died on Wednesday, at the age of eighty. In the nineteen-sixties, during the heydey of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford, he had success as a hard-throwing righty with the New York Yankees. But after the publication of the brutally honest and uproariously funny “Ball Four,” in 1970, he came to be seen, by many establishment types, as a kind of traitor to his profession. (For years afterward, he was not invited by the Yankees to their old-timers’ games—though the organization did bring him back to the Bronx, in 1998, following the death of his daughter.) The newspaper columnist Dick Young called him a “social leper.” Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, said that he’d “done the game a grave disservice.” Bouton later wrote that Kuhn, whom he nicknamed Ayatollah, tried to get him to sign a document recanting the stories about corousing, adultery, drug use, and contract disputes from the book. Bouton preferred the term “deviant” to describe himself, and he argued that, in this capacity, he’d done baseball a great service—making the sport relatable to fans by telling truths that other, better players couldn’t risk telling, and shouldering whatever blame followed.

Of course, not everyone was bothered by “Ball Four.” It sold well, and not only because of the gossip it shared about stars like Mantle. Many reviewers hailed it as groundbreaking. Time has bolstered its reputation, and, indeed, “Ball Four,” is great in all the ways that people now say it is: unadorned, ironic, bitterly funny, and yet also notably tender toward the men who play baseball, and the various doubts and insecurities and futilities that chase them. It has been picked up by successive generations who grew up amid a certain tone about baseball that “Ball Four” helped create—one that takes the piss out of the myths and grandeurs of the game without ever quite forsaking them. You don’t get “Bull Durham” or “Major League” or “Moneyball” without it.

Bouton did a lot of other things, besides. He helped invent Big League Chew bubble gum. He was a TV sports reporter, a preservationist, a 1972 Democratic Convention delegate for George McGovern, and an actor. (He is great-looking, tan, and mean in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” from 1973, in which he takes a bullet like a pro.) He seemed to get along best with people who saw baseball the way he did, as a spectacle and a performance, the whole notion of a professional enterprise of balls and bats a grand and wonderful lark. When player salaries began to reach impressive heights, Bouton wrote, “My position is that while the players don’t deserve all that money, the owners don’t deserve it even more.” He was drawn to guys like Bill Veeck, a franchise owner with the mind of a showman, who gave Bouton a minor-league contract during his later, wandering years. And he was a natural fit for Ted Turner, who, in the late seventies, as an enterprising owner of a team with terrible attendance, thought it perfectly fine to bring Bouton back to the majors for a news-making last hurrah.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss Bouton’s brief resurrection with the Braves as a gimmick. Although “Ball Four” seemed to show Bouton breaking faith with baseball, the truth was that, despite his diminishing skills, he was reluctant to leave the game behind. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always liked him. My favorite ballplayers are the guys who refuse to leave peaceably. Think of Rickey Henderson, who, at the age of forty-six, already a Hall of Famer, played with the gusto of a prospect for the San Diego Surf Dogs of the Golden Baseball League. Or Satchel Paige, who had to wait until his forties for the major leagues to integrate and give him his rightful chance—and then refused to walk away, pitching his final three innings, for the Kansas City A’s, at the age of fifty-eight. Like them, Bouton kept going, throwing junk balls through the nineteen-seventies in the minor-league anonymity of Teaneck, Knoxville, Portland, and Durango. His shot with the Braves in ’78 only came after a hot summer of toiling for Double-A Savannah, riding the bus and staying in lousy motels, for a thousand bucks a month.

Later, Bouton lamented that his return to the majors had been met with derision or silence. Leave it to Major League Baseball to miss a good story when it sees one. Kuhn told the players that the best way for them to promote baseball was to keep quiet and never say anything to “knock the game,” as Bouton put it. He broke that rule, and though his status as a pariah involved a little bit of mythmaking on his part, it would be years until he was fully brought back into the fold. Baseball has had few evangelists as committed as Bouton, however unorthodox he was. The current M.L.B. commissioner, Rob Manfred, has criticized top players for not drawing more attention to themselves. What he seems to be looking for—as if such a thing were regularly at hand rather than singular—is some of that exuberant Bouton spirit.

Bouton started four more games for the Braves in the fall of 1978, winning one and generally making a fair show of himself. As it had in his old Yankees days, his cap would pop off his head as he bent over during his exaggerated follow-through—a little picture of youth superimposed onto an aging ballplayer. “A two-year odyssey through the minor leagues by a 39-year-old man who finally makes it, may be one of the best testimonials baseball has ever had,” he wrote, in a postscript to a later edition of “Ball Four.” As ever with Bouton, what some people mistook for a goof had been another expression of true love.

The fashion calendar flipped to July and brought forth the rarefied presentations, in Paris, of clothing by the members of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture—a lot of sumptuous gowns to wear on autumn evenings among superstars, plutocrats, and oligarchs. The artistic director at Christian Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, opened her couture show with a simple white dress resembling the peplos of classical Greece: a rectangle of cloth draped to make a flowing column. Chiuri puts a lot of muscle into textual messaging; in 2017, she famously created a T-shirt printed with the phrase “We Should All Be Feminists,” in homage to the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This year, Chiuri printed the peplos with the title of a crucial work of social criticism—Bernard Rudofsky’s “Are Clothes Modern?”—in a typeface inspired by the cloth cover of its first edition, from 1947.

Rudofsky, who died in 1988, was an architect by training, a polymath by appetite, and an iconoclast by temperament. He is best known as the author of “Architecture Without Architects,” about ancient monuments, nomadic tents, and other amazing instances of primeval design, and second-best known as a reform-minded interdisciplinarian whose work ranged from urban planning to interior design. (His contribution to fashion studies, and, thereby, social theory, includes a lecture titled “How Can People Expect to Have Good Architecture When They Wear Such Clothes?”) Chiuri described “Are Clothes Modern?” as a major influence on her collection, telling the Guardian that everyone who makes clothing should read Rudofsky: “He writes about how fashion is not just about creativity but about all of human life.” I would go further and recommend this book-length essay to everyone who even thinks about wearing clothes. Its analysis offers an exceptional structure for considering such topics as the passing of fads, the ideology of luxury goods, the evolution of tattoo art, the changeability of body taboos, the persistence of pointless pockets, the psychic satisfaction of a chic self-portrait, and the splendor of Cardi B’s manicure.

“Are Clothes Modern?” is out of print, though available on the Web site of the Museum of Modern Art. (It is the catalogue essay for a 1944 exhibition curated by Rudofsky, the influence of which extended to the 2017 MOMA exhibition “Items: Is Fashion Modern?”) Rudofsky’s writing style is conjectural, aphoristic, coolly passionate, generally fantastic. Deploying broad historical knowledge and a keen comparative eye, he does an enormous amount of discoursing around the premise that “the clothes we wear today are anachronistic, irrational and harmful.” The accompanying illustrations, uniformly delightful, include a juxtaposition of the patterns of traditional Marquesan tattoos with those of late-Victorian hosiery. Pages 120 and 121 boast a jazzy graphic mapping the twenty-four pockets and seventy buttons of a mid-century man fully dressed in a suit and overcoat. “What glass beads are to the savage, buttons and pockets are to the civilized,” Rudofsky writes, intending no disrespect to primitive culture. On the contrary, his analysis flows from the belief that the physical constrictions of Western clothing, like the capitalist contortions required by the system of producing and consuming them, often represents the corruption of ancient desires for bodily decoration.

He gives a rich account of what has been thought attractive and appropriate on various continents in various centuries, braided through with a progressive manifesto in favor of renouncing such shackles as throttling collars. (The personal wardrobe of the author was that of a mellow and worldly academic—traditional suits in flannel and tweed, a jacket with a gently futuristic vibe in its mandarin collar, a pastoral straw hat matched with a checked cravat and dotted shirt.) He admires such reformers as Amelia Bloomer, whose fight for the right to vote was entwined with her advocacy of trousers, and he smiles on promising signs of the advent of the equalization of men’s and women’s clothing. Rudofsky wrote thrillingly tart prose, as when condensing a historical overview of an undergarment into a one-sentence story of transfiguration: “This corset which first was used as a remedy for supposed shapelessness, later became a focus of erotic attraction, wound up by being an indispensable requisite of decency.”

The book is calling clear across a gulf of time. Rudofsky was writing only a generation after the corset went out of style. The zipper was new enough that he calls it a “slide fastener.” His distance only enhances his relevance and encourages the contemporary reader’s sense of perspective. Rudofsky seems, now, prophetic for anticipating “play-clothes”—athletic gear and beach wear—as “the starting-point for the creation of a genuine contemporary apparel.” But he did not foresee the changes in social formality and technology functionality that have led to a world of men in fine-wool trousers with elasticized waistbands, and women in maternity overalls made with elaborately pre-ripped denim, and people carrying themselves with yoga-trained discipline as they go about their business in swishing mesh gym shorts or cropped lycra tank tops. He would receive the news of our world with a jolt of pleasure at the dropping of some pretense of false modesty and a shock of recognition at the evolution of athleisure.

Rudofsky’s agitation in favor of sensible design included the creation, with his wife, Berta, of a shoemaking enterprise, named Bernardo Sandals. The sandals, with their healthfully flat leather soles that follow the outlines of the foot and their straps like festive riffs on rustic tradition, were a favorite of Jane Birkin and Jacqueline Bouvier. Bernardo Sandals still thrives, and a pair can be yours, on Zappos or at Bloomingdale’s, at a fair price. These utopian artifacts are souvenirs of a mind that begins “Are Clothes Modern?” with an unexpurgated retelling of the Grimms’ version of “Cinderella,” where a maiden amputates a toe to force her foot to fit the precious shoe, and that returns to that theme about two hundred pages later. “The modern shoe is among the articles of dress whose improvement is retarded by the fact that it is an erotic implement,” Rudofsky writes. “The generation that will see the end of the barbarical initiation custom of putting females on high heels, and the young man whose emotions will still function without the stimulus of Cinderella’s slipper, will fare better.” Many of the shoes that Chiuri presented, in Paris, hewed to the Bernardo Sandals ideal. They exist for a future in which the Dior client comes to feel that the house’s current collection of pumps and sandals, distinguished by crooked high heels that look like artful exaltations of deformity, have gone out of style.

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