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.