View: Will have to wait longer to find Covid correlation between skirts and growth

Just a coincidence? In his classic 1977 book, Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour, ethologist (one who studies animal behaviour) Desmond Morris used a graph depicting the skirt years of 1921-77 in the West. Skirt length was long in 1921, became shorter during the Roaring Twenties – the flappers wore knee-length skirts considered daring at the time. The hems would become longer following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, until it became slightly shorter from 1950. Christian Dior’s iconic ‘New Look’ – long, voluminous skirts – was, in fact, born in war-ravaged France in 1947, when a lady in a white jacket was clicked by German photographer Willy Maywald on an empty street against an empty post-war sky. Minis would enter via the US during the economic uptick of the late 1960s, only to become long again in 1971 with the global oil crisis. Skirt length would shorten again during the 1980s boom, until the midi lengths popped up when the stock market crashed in 1987. And short skirts accompanied the tech bubble in the 1990s too. No economist or statistician – regardless of gender – ignores correlation of this kind.

A 2010 Erasmus University Rotterdam study, ‘The Hemline and the Economy: Is There Any Match?’ (bit.ly/3FOKeB2), used monthly data on the hemline for 1921-2009 and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) chronology of the economic cycle. It concluded a strong correlation between hemline length and the economy in the US. A time lag of about three years, however, was observed for fashion to respond to the economy.

Recent memory would confirm this. The great recession of 2008 didn’t stop the trend of shorter skirts immediately. So, the economic cycle may predict the length of a hemline, but not vice versa.

A 2016 study, ‘Revisit Hemline Index Theory: Forecasting Daily Trading of Short Skirts by Stock Market in China’ (bit.ly/3lFQi7a), by researchers from Nankai, Ludong and Sun Yat-sen Universities, based on the Shanghai Composite Index during March-November 2013, concluded that the closing price in the stock market can predict the searching volume and purchase of short skirts one day later. The hemline theory is, thus, verified repeatedly. But what are the underlying dynamics of such a correlation? One is that during a boom, when producers typically charge more for their yarn or textiles, designers would make skirts shorter to cut costs. Another idea is that as more women have to work, and need to look ‘more professional’ in the office during a slowdown, they tend to buy dresses with a longer hemline.

Or, do some leaders in the fashion industry just change skirt lengths during an economic crisis or boom since they believe that this is the ‘rule’? In his book, Morris does mention how designers tried several times to ‘break’ this relationship between economy and dress length – but always with disastrous results. Frankly, we still don’t know the ‘right’ cause for the correlation.

Other peculiar predictors of economy include the ‘haircut indicator’. This became popular in Japan due to surveys conducted by Kao Corp, the country’s second-largest cosmetics firm, over years. This index states that Japanese women tend to wear their hair long when Japan’s economy is doing well, and short when there is a slump. One reasonable explanation is that women adopt shorter hairstyles in harder times when they have less money to spend on haircare products.

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to causing serious economic crisis across the world, are we going to see longer skirts around, say, 2023, in keeping with the ‘three-years’ lag’ rule? Is there another ‘New Look’ in the making? What about the size of ghagras and blouses? Watch this space.