Across the decades of my research on his costume rhetoric, the question most often posed to me has been: is there a characteristic pattern of costume rhetoric in Geoffrey Chaucer's work? Throughout my study of his General Prologue (GP) to The Canterbury Tales, I searched in vain for such a configuration or methodology, even though the GP is Chaucer's tour de force for such descriptions. This single work (c. 1387) demonstrates Chaucer's art of variety as he masterfully puts into poetic play evocative words and phrases that shape the dress of numerous pilgrims, each fashion term contributing to their characterizations. While this costume rhetoric provides sociological and economic information, it also offers meanings that are symbolic and that suggest the moral and spiritual status of each pilgrim. In the GP, Chaucer's costume rhetoric draws on his cosmopolitan lifestyle as a London merchant's son, courtier, husband of the queen's lady in waiting, minor diplomat, European traveler, civil servant, valettus on military campaign, all of which supplement his knowledge of medieval literature and the descriptive conventions within those works. He does not so much employ contemporary literary conventions as he embroiders them – extracting telling bits, changing the focus of standard descriptions, and proffering new details for all of them without providing a standard structure of rhetoric for reader analysis.