Fashion & Trends
Clothes, styles and how trends rise, spread and return.
A skateboard, a bottle of juice, and a 43-year-old hit
In 2020 a man skateboarded to work drinking cranberry juice and lip-syncing Fleetwood Mac. The video sent “Dreams”, released in 1977, back into the US Top 20.
An 18-year-old’s failed medicine set off a fashion craze
In 1856 a student trying to make a malaria drug produced a purple stain instead, and within two years Europe was wearing mauve.
Do skirts really get shorter when the economy booms?
The “hemline index” says hemlines rise with stock prices. It’s usually credited to an economist in 1926, who didn’t actually propose it.
How trends spread, from royal courts to TikTok
For a century, the theory was that fashion trickled down from the rich. Then it started bubbling up from the street, and now it moves sideways through algorithms in weeks.
Pink for girls and blue for boys is younger than your grandparents
A century ago a trade magazine told shops that pink was for boys. The colour code we treat as ancient only settled in the mid-20th century.
Why your parents’ clothes look ridiculous, and your grandparents’ look charming
In 1937 a museum curator mapped how we feel about a style over time: “indecent” ten years early, “hideous” ten years late, “charming” after seventy.