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12 Dec 2013
Do Skirts Get Shorter When Wealth Declines?
George Taylor, an economist at Wharton School
in the 1920’s, claimed there was an inverse
relationship between the state of the economy
and skirt lengths. Today we discuss whether or
not rising skirt lengths could fuel economic
growth with new research suggesting that men
exposed to sexily-dressed women increase their
preference for expensive status goods.
Taylor made the following argument. He said
that in good economic times women shortened
their skirts to show off their silk stockings but
when times were bad they lengthened them to
hide that they couldn’t afford stockings. So when
the economy boomed skirts were short and when
it lagged skirts were longer.
I don’t think there is any evidence that this
theory held up in the long run, but more
recently some of my favorite marketing /
evolutionary biology researchers decided to have
one of their grad students (okay, that is pure
speculation on my part) get dolled up in a mini
skirt to see if men in an experimental setting
changed their preference for status products
when the experiment was conducted by a woman
dressed in a manner that would have made
George Taylor blush.*
Here is how the experiment worked. The
experimenter (an attractive young woman) asked
each participant to view ten images, each for one
second. Each of the ten images contained a
picture of six products arranged in a wheel. The
products were both functional (i.e. rolls of toilet
paper) or status (i.e. a Porsche, Aston Martin or
Maserati). After they viewed the images, the
experimenter then instructed the participant to
make a list of as many of the products as
possible in 25 seconds. Presumably the products
they listed were the ones that they most
immediately recalled from the images.
Pretty simple experiment. The interesting part is
that in half the experiments the experimenter
dressed in plain clothing (think farm girl with
glasses) and in the other half she wore a jean
mini skirt, a low cut top and heels (an early
version of the paper is available here with
pictures of the experimenter in both of her
guises and an example of the product images).
It turns out that men who indicated that they
were in a committed relationship recalled
roughly the same proportion of status goods
when the experimenter was in her sexy clothes
(33%) as when she was in her plain clothes
(35%). The men who indicated that they were
single, however, recalled significantly more
status goods when the experimenter wore a mini
skirt (43%) than they did when she was in her
farm clothes (33%).
Independent of their relationship status, both
types of men recalled a lower proportion of
functional products when the experimenter was
in her mini skirt. I suspect they were distracted.
The evolutionary argument is that when a single
man is in the presence of an attractive, young
woman his preference for products turns to
those that can help him secure her as a mate.
He assumes, perhaps subconsciously, that the
products that will attract her are those that
indicate his wealth.
This raises an interesting point. As women’s
fashion has evolved over time in a way that
makes women more conspicuously sexual, has
this changed men’s preference for products that
more conspicuously demonstrate their wealth
and status?
The answer to this question is probably no. One
of the fundamental principles of economics is
that the price of a good is related to its relative
scarcity. If scantily clad women are scarce, then
their price is high (where here the “price” is the
amount a man must spend in order to
demonstrate his affluence to a relatively
attractive woman). When scantily clad women
increase in abundance, however, their price is
bound to fall as men no longer need to compete
with each other over the relatively scarce good.
In fact, as hemlines go up, conspicuous
consumption of status goods might fall for
precisely this reason.
What has become relatively scarce over the past
few years is affluent men. Can this be driving
fashion trends that suggest shorter hemlines this
season? Maybe that is the real effect that
George Taylor observed all those years ago.
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