Short Stuff: The Style Cycle

A study presented at the American Physical Society Global Physics Summit in Denver analyzed 37,000 images of women’s clothing from 1869 onward, along with runway photos and sewing patterns from the Commercial Pattern Archive at the University of Rhode Island. The researchers used data points like the distance from the eye to the neckline, the neckline to the waist, and the waist to the hemline to quantify changes in dress styles over time. When they assembled these into a flipbook, they could see necklines and hemlines rising and falling on a roughly 20-year cycle. This confirmed what had long been an anecdotal observation: fashion styles tend to repeat themselves about every two decades.

Why the cycle exists

The cycle is driven by a combination of social and creative pressures. People want to fit in but also express individuality, and designers grow bored once a style becomes too widespread. As one host put it, once a look like mom jeans saturates the market, “designers are like, we're bored with this. I want to come up with something else.” That something else, according to the data, is usually a reach back 20 years. The hosts noted the Shakespearean idea that “there’s nothing new under the sun” applies directly to fashion design—designers do not so much invent as recycle, with each generation rediscovering and updating the looks of a couple of decades prior.