The Math Behind Fashion's Cycles
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What is the significance of fashion cycles in the clothing industry?
Your above average intelligence brought you here. It deserves above average absurdity. This is The Last Show with David Cooper.
cyclical. Should you hang on to that old zoot suit in your closet because it might come back in style? Well, according to the math, yes, it is cyclical. Turns out trends don't just repeat. They sort of oscillate like a little pendulum. Let's jump in with someone who's researched this. She is a mathematician at Princeton. Her name is Emma Jaidela. Emma, welcome to the show. So great to be here. I am glad that the awkward, ugly and unfashionable pieces in my wardrobe might be coming back. This is big news. My girlfriend tells me to throw out my clothes. I guess I don't have to now. You just have to hold on to them for 20 years and then they'll be back. Is that the period? Is that the general rule?
How does Emma Zajdela explain the 20-year fashion cycle?
20 years? That is, we found in the data that we analyzed that the period is 20 years. And what was really exciting to us about this is apparently this has been known in the fashion industry for some time, but it's never been proven. And then when we found it, we were mathematicians. We looked at the data. We found this 20-year cycle. And six months after that, we realized that people had known this in the fashion industry for a long time. I guess it makes sense. Like I look at Gen Z, I'm a millennial. And in the early 2000s, us millennials, when we were young and cool, we kind of like rejected Gen X clothing, you know, like with our skinny jeans and stuff. And now Gen Z, they seem to dress like Gen X, it looks like.
Yeah, totally. Although I've also heard that the early 2000s are back right now. So the low-waste genes have been coming back, for example, which would be about 20 years. Some people think that this 20-year cycle might be a generational gap. So exactly what you're saying, maybe your parents are uncool or the generation right before you is not cool. But if it gets old enough and it becomes vintage... And then it becomes cool again. Let's get into the math, though, because you aren't just like some fashion commentator. You actually modeled the math, figured it out. How do you prove something like that? Like you analyze garments. What exactly do you do? 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.
What data did Emma use to analyze fashion trends?
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. 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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the significance of fashion cycles in the clothing industry?
0:03–0:59
2
How does Emma Zajdela explain the 20-year fashion cycle?
0:59–3:27
3
What data did Emma use to analyze fashion trends?
3:27–6:29
4
What mathematical methods are applied to understand fashion trends?
6:29–8:40
5
How do societal changes influence fashion cycles?
8:40–10:06
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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