During Economic Crises Skirts Become Shorter.

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.

Needless to say, these findings can trigger a negative visceral reaction in people, as it implies that women's propensity to engage in sexual signaling (at the aggregate level) is in part shaped by macro-indicators that should otherwise be decoupled from women's beautification practices. I will leave it to the reader to judge the veracity of these studies. That said, given the current economic conditions, and assuming that the general theory espoused in the latter papers is veridical, we should expect to have contemporary hemlines of this form:

To those who are feeling slighted that I am focusing on women's sexual signaling, my next post will provide equal air time to men's sexual signaling namely I shall address the following: Are men who dance well more attractive than those poor chaps who seem to have two left feet on the dance floor? Stay tuned. Ciao for now.

Source for Images:
http://www.investmentpostcards.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hemline-c…
http://www.total-lingerie.net/images/club20.jpg