If women’s fashion is the litmus test of recession, now we are down-at-heel

ACCORDING to Laver’s Law, I’m dowdy, and you hold the evidence in your hand.

The outfit in the picture on this page is three years old. The shame of it.

James Laver – the definitive fashion historian – developed a clever timeline to explain the phases of style. Laver, whose day job was in the Victoria and Albert museum, said that if you wore a garment 10 years before its time, it was indecent. Five years before its time, it was shameless. Then you got one year within which you were in high fashion. Immediately thereafter, you became dowdy.

What, I hear you ask, has this got to do with the serious issues of the day, like NAMA? To which I answer, a) God gave us bank holidays so we could be trivial, and b) quite a lot.

Brian Lenihan may not know the style implications of his economic rescue plans, but if he doesn’t yank this country back into prosperity within 10 years, we’re going to be wearing clothes that fit into Laver’s “Hideous” category. That’s the one devoted to clothes a decade beyond their hanger life.

Twenty years after their prime, clothes, according to Laver, become “Ridiculous”. – as will be confirmed by anybody who recently came upon a photograph of themselves wearing Joan Collins’ shelf-shouldered power suits, topped off by more hair than they remembered owning at the time.

As time passes, though (and this is why charity shops are the fashionista’s last stand, in a recession) old clothes become “Amusing” (30 years after their time) “Quaint” (50 years after they were produced) “Charming” (when they hit their 70th birthday), “Romantic” (as they turn the century) and finally “Beautiful” when they are 150-years-old and counting.

In developing his theories about clothes as a hugely significant set of cultural symbols, James Laver believed that the desire to distinguish oneself as belonging to one group in society and very definitely not belonging to another group, was central to the choosing of clothes. Historically this was easy to do. Royalty had exclusive rights to the wearing of certain fabrics and colours. Nobility wore another set, as did members of the Church hierarchy. The rest wore castoffs, colourless rags and the skins of last Tuesday’s dinner.

If he had been alive in the last 10 years, Laver would have interpreted the stampede to buy Ferraris, Vuitton luggage and Gucci handbags as a classic attempt by the nouveau riche to prove that they were important, that they mattered, that they were to be respected and emulated. He would also have been with George Lee and David McWilliams in predicting it wouldn’t last, and that, as always happens when there’s a world economic downturn, fashion would respond quickly and radically. Women’s fashion is a litmus test of recession. Colours become more sober, fabrics less luxurious and hemlines head for the knee.

Having got through WWII in knee-length skirts and “turned” coats, women were ready, in the late 40s, for Christian Dior’s “New Look” with its sensuous silks, satins and cashmeres, its tiny belted waists and lavish, lengthy, flowing skirts puffed by multiple petticoats.

Similarly, as Britain and Ireland came out of the thrifty 50s into the swinging 60s, fashion became a carnival of colour and of wildly varying hemlines, when girls wore maxi-coats (an homage to the huge popularity of the movie Dr Zhivago) over micro-mini skirts.

THIS time, as the recession deepens, the big trend seems to be in shoes, not fabrics or dress lengths. It could be argued that it was only in the late 20th century that shoes moved from accessory status to becoming dominant fashion statements in their own right. Throughout history, perhaps because they did little more than peep out from under long skirts, shoes followed style rather than led it.

In some cultures, they indicated subservience: little Chinese girls had their feet bound at an early age, so that they would never grow to more than a third of their natural size.

This crippled and caused enormous life-long pain, but ensured that they had a tittuping walk in tiny platform shoes and underlined their largely decorative function in the lives of their powerful, active, men.

Shoes could also serve as marketing devices. The archaeological teams who dug out Pompeii, the city entombed by the eruption of the neighbouring volcano, Vesuvius, were initially puzzled by words left imprinted on the dried-out soil of the town’s streets. Eventually, they worked out that local prostitutes had letters carved on the soles of their shoes, so, as they walked through Pompeii’s thoroughfares, the mud would capture and hold for some time, thanks to the daily drying effect of the sun, an imprint of the message “Follow Me”.

However, while, in the relatively recent past, shoes became symbols of wealth and status, this may be the first recession where they figure as a major trend.

The word from the fashion experts is that, now that we’re down-at-heel financially, we’re to be down-at-heel in clothing terms, too. Flats are the new fashion imperative.

Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, says so. Victoria Beckham’s five-inch heels are history.

The economy has cut us all down to size and the only way to respond is by eliminating the wearing of high heels. Leading the trend are Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni Sarkozi. Remember those pictures of Carla, on her first official visit to Britain, wearing that beautifully tailored grey suit and the cute ballerina pumps?

And don’t forget Michelle’s kitten heels or those completely flat-soled boots she wore the day she inaugurated the vegetable garden at the White House.

It must be remembered, however, that Michelle and Carla are tall. Very tall. Michelle’s husband is barely taller then her, while Carla must stoop to kiss the French president. They don’t want to tower over them. So they wear kitten heels and flats.

If recession means flats, that will be tough. Much worse, however, are the shoe possibilities that lie at the other end of the recession.

When, at the millennium, the US was coming out of a markedly softer recession, the relief found expression, at ground level, in the wild success of the ugliest footwear ever created: Crocs. Despite George W Bush wearing them, they became a worldwide fad.

The Croc corporation sold for $200 million (€141,400). The quintessential lunacy of the 21st century is that people stuck their hard-earned money into a company whose only product was a wearable plastic colander.

The tragedy is that, although it looks as if the company making them may be out of business by the end of September, the horrors they made are virtually indestructible. Old crocs never die. They last forever. They will be the exception to Laver’s Law.

Fifty years from now, they will not be quaint. And 150 years from now, they will not be beautiful.

Someone once said that what we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. If that’s true, when we come out of this recession, some fashion item comparable in durability and ugliness with the Croc will become the new Big Thing.

Barefoot would be a better option.