I’ve been to two weddings over the last two weekends and in doing so noticed something odd about the female guests: they’ve all been wearing long dresses. You expect this from the bride, obviously, but not, in general, from the guests. However, as a trend it fits in very neatly with the theory of the hemline indicator – that when things are bad for the economy, fashion designers drop skirt lengths and when things are good they raise them.
Look back across the decades and this seems to hold good. In the 1920s hemlines rose. In the 30s they fell. In the 50s and early 60s they inched their way back up – until they barely covered our mothers’ knickers in the mid-60s. They fell back in the 70s, only to soar again in the 80s. The last few years have seen the return of the ‘midi’ (calf-length) and now, as we enter what will surely be a full-blown recession, possibly accompanied by a political crisis, we have the full-on ankle-length ‘maxi’ as modelled by Angelina Jolie throughout her seemingly endless pregnancy.
The idea that markets and hemlines are correlated makes some intuitive sense, too. Showing a lot of leg suggests confident decadence (note that in the 80s mini-skirts weren’t just short, but made out of lycra, too – decadence indeed). Showing none suggests a kind of hairshirt austerity. But here’s the really interesting thing. Hemlines don’t just tell us how fashion land is feeling today, they tell us how it thinks it will feel in a year.
For all the talk of instant fashion these days, trends are set many months in advance. The things we are wearing today went down the catwalk last autumn and were designed some time before that. So last August when practically every single fund manager in the world was bullish on all markets for 2008, when most of the UK was in denial about the property crash, and when the consensus view was that subprime was a crisis “contained”, the fashion world somehow knew it wasn’t – they were busy putting finishing touches to maxis, not minis. It seems designers, who spend a lot of time wandering the streets and visiting fabric factories, have a clearer view of the world than City analysts, sitting at their desks, looking at doctored statistics through bonus-coloured glasses, can ever hope to.
So what’s next? The shows for this autumn and winter were pretty maxi-biased, too. Toss any body-conscious dresses you might have in your wardrobe, says Grazia magazine, and “treasure” your maxi dresses. Next spring, say my fashion friends, expect a mixture of maxi and midi. With that in mind (along with a few other things), we have moved into an even more miserable mind frame than usual. We can find almost nothing in the markets that we would invest our own money in – we are even cutting back on commodities. Indeed, so dismal-looking are economies and markets at the moment that we are reduced to recommending that you take a look at the most obvious defensive industry there is – pharmaceuticals.