Once again, fashion points towards tough times. Let's just hope that ties don't come back as "must have" items for business meetings.
Fashion designers now seem clairvoyant. This summer's collections - shown last October, when the stocks were still riding high on a bull market - were filled with long skirts. From classic Chanel to cool Christopher Kane, dresses were long and languorous or a waterfall of frills - but always scraping the floor. Fashion had turned its back on the Paris Hilton girlie glitz: short, sheer dresses; sequinned sparkles; and any-color-as-long-as-it-is-pink.
Why wasn't Wall Street noting the sartorial changes? Although designers always dismiss the correlation between skirt lengths and financial markets as a fashion historian's fantasy, the parallels are striking. Up went hemlines to dizzying heights in the financial and social whirl of the roaring 1920s - revealing women's legs for the first time in recorded history. Then came the bear market and bare was out - except for low backs on the floor-length gowns that dropped hemlines just before the 1929 Wall Street crash.
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