Emma Zajdela

Interesting.

OK, so but the hemlines, the necklines, the waistlines, the whatever lines, you really did notice this kind of oscillating 20 year trend.

How far does it go back?

We did.

So it was pretty crazy, actually, when we first looked at this data.

It starts from around the 1920s and then goes till today.

We have some amount, about 25,000 of our dresses that are for something called the Commercial Pattern Archive.

And these are archives of sewing patterns that actually anyone could go online.

And I know costume designers do this, for example.

It's hosted at the University of Rhode Island.

And you could go and you could download images of these dresses dating back to, I think the latest one in the collection is actually in the 1860s.

Wow.

Although those were all floor-length dresses.

So what we found in the data is these really cool two different clusters, I would say.

The first one is that there's always floor-length dresses.

So the maxi dress is always in, always has been.

In the past, it's actually kind of funny, in the 1860s, for example, they would have these long trains, so in some ways would even extend past the length of the floor, if you think of it that way.

But so there's this maxi cluster that always exists.

And then there's an upper cluster of shorter dresses that oscillates.

So this looks like the sine wave that you might have seen in school.