This lasting fashion legacy is all the more extraordinary considering how stingy Conan Doyle was with descriptions of dress. Our image of Holmes comes almost entirely from his illustrator, Sidney Paget, whose elegant, angular prototype influenced every incarnation thereafter. Though he didn’t always share them with readers, however, Conan Doyle clearly had firm ideas about Holmes’s appearance; he once protested that a poster for the 1899 play Sherlock Holmesmade the detective look “about five feet high” and “badly dressed.” And Timothy Long, the Museum of London’s fashion curator, points out that Conan Doyle used a “lost language” of fashion. “The modern audience reading these stories often overlooks clues that were very obvious to contemporary readers,” he says. “Putting Watson in a morning coat or a frock coat indicated the time of day, for example.”