In 2001, Leonard Lauder, the former CEO of Estée Lauder, proclaimed that in tough economic times, the sales of lipstick increase. This has since been coined the Lipstick Index. The argument works as follows: as a means of adjusting to the difficult economic climate, women will forgo higher ticket items such as expensive shoes but in their quest to indulge themselves will turn their attention to other "feel-good" purchases such as lipsticks. Close to eight decades earlier, the economists George Taylor (1926) and Paul Nystrom (1928), and more recently Helmut Gaus (1992) had noted that hemlines fluctuated in accordance with economic indicators. Specifically, as the economy worsens, hemlines become shorter. Whereas several compelling causes have been proposed for these interesting links between products of beautification and economic indicators, they have typically been void of an evolutionary understanding of the processes that might be operative.
In 2005, a team of British scientists published a paper in Human Nature wherein they analyzed the sexiness of women's clothing as depicted in the magazine UK Vogue covering the period 1916 through 1999. They found that as the economic conditions worsened, women's fashion styles became more provocative. They argued that to the extent that many women utilize their physical looks as sexual signals in the mating arena, one should expect that intra-sexual competition would yield a pressure for greater "sexual advertisement" in tough economic times. A few years earlier, Nigel Barber, a fellow PT blogger, had published a paper in Sex Roles wherein he reported a negative correlation between the number of women who hold B.A. degrees at any given time (in relation to men who hold such degrees) and the corresponding hemlines. Specifically, as the number of educated women increased, skirts became shorter. One intriguing possibility is that intra-sexual competition as evidenced by the increase in the number of educated women in the workforce yield pressure to augment one's sexual signaling on the mating market.
