During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York City served as the geographical centre for the theatre and fashion industries in the United States. The products shown on Broadway stages and in Macy's department store windows launched consumer trends across the nation. Schweitzer's study explores the period between 1890 and 1920, when these industries strategically aligned to promote their products in an increasing competitive marketplace of mass production and mass consumption. From her opening account of spectators trampling one another for complimentary hats at the 1908 Broadway performance of The Merry Widow, through her analysis of on- and offstage clothing worn by famous actresses and Ziegfeld chorus girls, Schweitzer locates key crossroads between the worlds of theatre and fashion. Her extensive research and use of primary sources – newspapers, theatre and fashion magazines, production reviews, playbills and advertisements – provide a solid foundation to investigate the cultural implications of these industry intersections. Although the historic details are specific to the US theatre, her analysis of material culture and attention to issues of labour, class and gender broadens the book's scope to appeal to a wider readership.

Schweitzer's focus on material culture distinguishes her study from others using biographical details of performers and producers to examine celebrity culture and commerce. Her references to actresses such as Maxine Elliot, Sophie Tucker and Irene Castle emphasize their participation in the construction of their public image through on- and offstage fashion choices. Each chapter uncovers the complex social and economic circumstances surrounding the styling of actresses before the professionalization of costume designers and institution of union regulations demanding producers provide stage clothing. Her most compelling argument centres on actresses’ strategic use of fashion to establish a degree of control over their careers in the face of producers who showcased women's bodies as stage commodities. She further complicates this argument by highlighting the class advantages of leading ladies, noting that actresses hired for secondary roles were at a significant disadvantage since they had fewer economic resources to maintain current standards of beauty and fashion.

Schweitzer connects her semiotic analysis of stage costumes to garments created by the fashion industry through an analysis of clothing trends sparked by Broadway performers and marketed to spectators. Copies of stage gowns, some crafted by dressmakers for wealthy clients and others mass-produced for sale in department stores, gave female spectators the opportunity to fashion their own modern identities. Again, Schweitzer accentuates class distinctions between different spectators, outlining the distinct market resources available to socialites, middle-class ‘matinee girls’ and working-class women. She closes by examining theatrical techniques used by the fashion industry to appeal to consumers, including the development of fashion shows and practices of modelling as distinct from acting. But the heart of Schweitzer's study, especially for the theatre scholar, is the primary-source research and nuanced analysis that uncovers historical practices of theatre commerce that continue to inform contemporary trends in performance, fashion and consumption.