PARIS: If only those hedge-fund hotties had taken their eyes off their screens and looked at Angelina Jolie's hemlines! Financial pundits should take note that in the months since the movie star found 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, over-exposure 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 the stocks were still riding high on a bull market - 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-is-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. Up went hemlines to dizzying heights in the financial and social whirl of the roaring 1920s - revealing women's legs for the first time 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 the Second World War (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, of course, 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 a hunch than a proven 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," says 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," says Koda. "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."
news source : http://www.iht.com/
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