Thought this was pretty entertaining.
Bulls, Bears and the Bellwether Hemline
PARIS
IF only those hedge fund hotties had taken their eyes off their screens and looked at Angelina Jolie?s
hemlines! Financial pundits should note that in the months since the
movie star found that she was expecting twins and adopted a new
ankle-length, hippie-de-luxe style, the stock market has followed her
downward trajectory.
The floor-sweeping style started a trend
taken up by young Hollywood from Jessica Simpson to the über-stylist
Rachel Zoe. Their look offers an eerie parallel with the 1970s ? the
last time that recession and plummeting hemlines were in unison.
Fashion
is always a mirror of society. Thus, in a strange forecast of what the
Federal Reserve discovered in the banking system, overexposure and
total transparency in the wardrobe has been followed by complex
cover-ups and a downward spiral. Fashion designers now seem clairvoyant.
This summer?s collections ? shown last October, when stocks were still
riding high ? were filled with long skirts. From classic Chanel to cool
Christopher Kane, dresses were long and languorous or a waterfall of
frills ? but always scraping the floor. Fashion had turned its back on
the Paris Hilton girlie glitz: short, sheer dresses; sequinned sparkles; and any color as long as it?s pink.
Why
wasn?t Wall Street noting the sartorial changes? Although designers
always dismiss the correlation between skirt lengths and financial
markets as a fashion historian?s fantasy, the parallels are striking.
Hemlines rose to dizzying heights in the financial and social whirl of
the roaring 1920s ? revealing women?s legs for one of the first times
in recorded history. Then came the bear market and bare was out ?
except for low backs on the floor-length gowns that dropped hemlines
just before the 1929 Wall Street crash.
War always brings
clothing back to the status quo, according to James Laver, the
historian who traced the rise and fall of waistlines as symbolic of
social upheaval in his sweeping study ?Costume: The Arts of Man,?
published in 1963. The end of World War II (and the arrival of
Christian Dior) brought waists and hemlines back to ?normal.? But as
soon as the economy expanded in the 1960s, up and away went miniskirts
? only to crash with the financial troubles in the 1970s. And so the
graph of skirt lengths has continued in tandem with Western economies
with the 15-year run of bull markets reflected in short-and-sweet
dresses.
You could put the current fashion down to boredom and
a desire for change. Or, in the case of Jolie and other actresses like
Jessica Alba and Gwen Stefani, a way of maternity dressing that elongates a puffy silhouette and conceals swollen ankles and veined legs.
But
that simplistic view does not explain why the long skirts have caught
on even with young French women, who traditionally have always worn
short, slim outfits. The fact that Jolie?s maternity wardrobe of
high-waisted, floor-sweeping dresses came from Gérard Darel, a
middle-market French clothing company, rather than from either a
designer resource or a fast fashion chain, proves that there is a
pent-up demand for the look. Expect a new version of the maxi coat to
surface for winter.
Yet the absolute connection between finance and fashion remains more hunch than reality. Harold Koda, curator in charge of the Costume Institute
at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, instigated a research project
at Harvard Business School to try and nail the reality of the myth.
?There were many exceptions ? the rule does not always apply,? said Mr.
Koda, who himself looked at the idea that ?flush times mean higher
hemlines? by taking expansive fashion way back to the 1860s.
?What
you can say is that any great designer has his or her finger on the
pulse of society,? Mr. Koda said. ?And when you are psychologically
battered and feel a sense of encroaching pessimism, there is a tendency
to cover up ? whether that means long sleeves, higher necklines, long
skirts or opaque tights.?
Mr. Koda has just returned from Moscow,
where he noted skirts as brief and as thin as the veneer of luxury and
glamour covering the party players in the city. The sky-high hemlines
reinforce the hemline theory: in a country like Russia, where the
economy is expanding and ostentatious consumption is the height of
fashion, long skirts are nowhere to be seen.
Contrast that
situation with the American mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
tottering on the brink of commercial collapse and you see why the vogue
for long dresses should have infiltrated even Hollywood, where the
screenwriters? strike last year added to the gloom coating the habitual
glitz and glamour. As fashionistas might put it when asked why they
voted for plunging hemlines: ?It?s the economy, stupid.?
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