Justified or not, geisha loom large as cultural icons of Japan to the outside world. Yet the Western view of geisha completely misses one of their most important contributions within Japan–that of fashion arbiter. Especially through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when kimono was still the most common mode of dress found in Japan, geisha formed the vanguard of what defined fashion, setting trends that filtered down to respectable mainstream Japanese women. Liza Dalby is an anthropologist who spent a year as a geisha in Japan. She is the author of Geisha (1983), Kimono–Fashioning Culture (1993), and The Tale of Murasaki: A Novel (2000) and was a consultant to Rob Marshall's film, Memoirs of a Geisha (2004), based on a novel by Arthur Golden.