Dressing for the downturn: “Back in the 1920s, George Taylor, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that hemlines on women?s skirts were a useful indicator of economic activity. They moved higher in good times, because women could afford to wear, and show off, expensive silk stockings. In hard times, they moved lower, as modesty required that less expensively clad legs be covered. Sure enough, skirts were short in the roaring twenties, and long in the Great Depression.”