Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, will appear before the Senate on Tuesday morning.

Fashion is essentially a story of what the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge called “punctuated equilibrium,” a theory positing that significant change comes in spurts that interrupt lengthy periods of stability or slow evolution. It’s how we got L.B.D.s, the New Look, pants, the possibilities of destruction.