Going back even further from Pinterest in 2007, I present a page from the J. Peterman catalog in 1996, selling us a linen jacket:

And my god, how they sell it:
A paragraph from the J Peterman catalog. Text reads: "This buttonless, pocketless, hooded linen jacket created chaos at our office. (The women talked about it and stole the samples; the men could only talk about it.) They said, "The real Audrey Hepburn, at home in her gardens." They said, "Emma Thompson before Hollywood." They said, "The French iieutenant's Woman' but contemporary. And happy." They said, "I don't care how stupid it sounds, there's something rather spiritual about it." (1 do care about how stupid it sounds. But she's not wrong.) They argued very modern, sort of soft Comme des Garçons versus completely classic, a shape we've been seeing for three hundred years. It looks like nothing on the hanger and really not much in the picture. It looks like everything on. It's certainly true that it's a great strolling-on-Block Island jacket. Also a great first-night-back-in-town jacket. Also a great champagne-in-a-rowboat jacket. Charming with your oldest, widest linen pants. Staggering over a slip of ivory charmeuse."

Imagine being 16–anxious (clinically), awkward, with bad skin and giant jeans–and reading, “a great champagne-in-a-rowboat jacket” and also “Staggering over a slip of ivory charmeuse.” A different world was possible just through clothes? People who wore those clothes referenced culture I’d never heard of and owned linen pants and drank champagne in rowboats? Sign me UP.

The illustration doesn’t do a great job showing what the jacket actually looks like but that is beside the point; the point is the story and the promise. Can we thank Peterman for me becoming a marketing writer? I think we can.