Are there correlations/predictive factors for fashion cycles?

by inexplicably_angry

I remember reading that men's ties tend to be wider in times of more rapid economic growth and I was wondering if there are other noted trends like this.

chocolatepot

The short answer is no, but a flat negative is difficult to support, so while I'm going to try to answer well I welcome follow-up questions.

The idea of correlations between fashion and economics is not supported by fashion historians; half the time the purported correlations do not turn up outside of a single decade, and when there does seem to possibly be something, it doesn't tend to hold outside of the twentieth century.

In the case of tie width, to examine how well it holds true one would look at a period of economic depression. In actual fact, men's neckties were essentially the same width during the depression of the 1930s, and in the 1920s, when there was more economic growth.

Another version of this posits that women's skirts rise when times are better. For evidence, they point to the shorter skirts of the mid-1920s, which went back down in 1928-1929, rose again during the war years, and went up again with the miniskirt in the 1960s, etc. However, this ignores both the post-war "New Look" (the stereotypical 1950s full skirt, which was also generally worn at mid-calf, longer than skirts were worn during World War II - yet during a period of economic growth) and the many fluctuations in skirt length over the course of the 19th century that bore no relation to booms and panics.