Short Stuff: The Style Cycle

Josh Clark (0:04)

Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and I'm super stressed out. Jerry's there too, and she's sitting in for Dave, and this is short stuff.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (0:12)

That's right, about the style cycle, thanks to Popular Science, Sartorial magazine, baracko.com and not barackobama.com, but baracko.com and earth.com for this information.

Josh Clark (0:24)

So the style cycle, if you haven't guessed already, refers to that idea that fashion styles come back in vogue again, to use a fashion term, every 20-ish years.

I always thought it was more like 30, but I think 20 is what most people say. And it's always been this anecdotal observation that most people agree on. But I think recently, I didn't see when the study was conducted, but some researchers from Northwestern University came up with a very clever way to actually study it to see if it's a thing. And they found like, yes, it is indeed a thing, that fashion exists basically on 20-year cycles, and that fashion designers are very, very lazy by year 20 They just reach back and start over again.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (1:11)

Yeah, they did quite a few things for the study. They analyzed 37,000 images of women's clothing, so this is for women's style, from 1869 forward.

And this was a big deal. This was presented at the American Physical Society Global Physics Summit in Denver, and they didn't just look at pictures, right? They had all those 37,000 images, but that wasn't good enough.

Josh Clark (1:35)

No, they found a bunch of runway images from over the decades. They found sewing patterns from the commercial pattern archive at the University of Rhode Island, so they assembled a ton of images. And then this is what they did that was so clever.

They used data points, starting with the distance from the eye to the neckline, the neckline to the waist, and the waist to the hemline at the bottom of a dress. I think they just studied dresses exclusively. And so because now they had data points, they were able to quantify this, like how far the neckline plunged or how far it came up. And so they were able to watch it over time, and what they saw when they drew each thing in a flip book, it took them forever. And then they flipped through it, you could see like the neckline going up and down. You could see the hemline going up and down.

And it was about on a 20-year cycle that it did these things, that it repeated, swung back and forth.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (2:40)

I'm going to say something that will not surprise you or anyone else listening. My brother used to do flip books when we were a kid.

Josh Clark (2:46)

Man, was he good?

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (2:48)

Yeah, they were good. They were like stick figure thing. Well, that's not true. A lot of them were stick figures. Like, I remember very distinctly a flip book, and of course, I would just eat this stuff up and do my own poor versions afterwards. But like I remember a stick figure pole vaulter, like running down and pole vaulting. But then, like my brother was a really good artist. He would, I don't know why, but for a certain period in his younger years, he was drawing like war stuff and people getting blown to bits, like a flip book of a hand grenade, like blowing a guy into pieces.

Yeah, very interesting for such a peaceful guy.

Josh Clark (3:21)

For sure.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (3:23)

Anyway, just flip book memory.

Josh Clark (3:27)

I went to go make one the other day and I was like, forget this, this is going to be hard and take a lot of time that I don't have. So much respect to your brother for that.

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (3:37)

Yeah, mine were pretty jumpy.

So this idea of fashion is that people want to fit in, but they also want to have their own style.

And this also idea with designers that once something becomes too widespread, that designers are done with it basically. So it's sort of a give and take idea.

Josh Clark (3:59)

It is. So say that like mom jeans were a new thing in like the 2010s, right?

Charles "Chuck" W. Bryant (4:07)

Yeah.

Josh Clark (4:07)

They were actually from the 80s and 90s, but to the 2010s, they were like brand new and they were quite revolutionary and daring that somebody would try to rock mom jeans because they've always been looked at as just like frumpy, right?

Mom jeans became so prevalent that you could not find women's jeans that weren't essentially mom's jeans in some way, shape or form. And then eventually the designers are like, we're bored with this, I want to come up with something else. So they do something else, right? That's essentially what you're saying. What this is saying is that the something else they do is jump back 20 years again.