Emma Zajdela

Well, that's a really good question.

When we first set out to do this, we started to think, okay, how do we even quantify fashion?

What does that even mean?

And we're mathematicians, so we like to simple things, make things as simple as possible.

We originally thought of something along one dimension.

So we thought of the width of men's ties that, okay, this would be a perfect thing.

We could just quantify how big and small the men's ties get over time.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find data that would be pretty good on the width of men's ties.

So instead, we decided to look at women's dresses.

And we collected this amazing database of 100 years of women's dresses.

There's around 35,000 dresses that we analyzed.

And we analyzed them along what I like to call the vertical axis from the head to the feet.

So neckline, waistline, and hemline.

And part of the reason for choosing Hemline in specific is that there's been this idea for about 100 years or so now that Hemline is inversely related to the economy.

I don't know if you've ever heard of this.

No, that's a wild connection, but please keep going.

Yeah, so apparently in the 1920s, some economists came up with this idea.

And it had to do back then with the fact that women were silk stockings.

And when they had enough money to buy real silk stockings, then the dresses would become short so that they could show them off.

And when they didn't, then the dresses would become longer to cover the fact that they weren't real silk stockings.