A Tale of Two Malls: the economics of an ailing American icon

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Westside Pavillion, 2008., Los Angeles, California.

If you want to find an example of the current state of American shopping mall, you may want to take a visit to Westside Pavillion in Los Angeles. Like so many dying malls across the US, Westside Pavillion is an eerie, empty site during operating hours. In better days, the mall was the site for movie shoots and music videos. Now, anchor stores like Nordstrom and Macy’s have left the mall, leaving only the Landmark Theatre, Urban Home, and Macy’s Furniture Gallery behind. The mall is set to close in 2021, and will be remodeled for office space for media and tech companies. Westside Pavillion’s story isn’t unique. For instance,  a quarter of American malls are in danger of closing.

However, some other shopping malls tell a different story. If you take the twenty minute drive to The Grove, you’ll find a different sort of retail story. Customers flock towards it’s luxury department stores and stroll through a nostalgic boulevard with a matching emerald green trolly. Built in 2001, as a “Main Street for a city that does not have one” some may see the Grove as a shining example of the new american mall. You can find the same  open air, luxury stores, and experiential designs in other popular, revamped malls like Westfield Century City and Santa Monica Place.

The Grove, Los Angeles, California Source: Wikimedia Commons

So why are some malls doing better than others? While many American malls are closing, the survivors are adapting in order to accommodate the new offline retail experience: luxury goods and attractions.  As online retail continues to grow, dying malls and retail also affect labor demands and deplete a form of revenue for some vulnerable counties.

Symptoms

How does a mall begin to die? Data shows that one symptom was the Great Recession. plowing While the recession helped put brick-and-mortars like Toys ‘R’ Us, Sports Authority, and Circuit City out of business, it had a lasting effect on malls as well. General Growth Properties, which owned almost 18 percent of American malls during the recession, filed for bankruptcy in 2009. A lack of customer traffic drove profits down. It was difficult to turn dying malls into repurposed spaces due to declining property values and the subsequent end of the building boom. Online retail also aided in the decline of American malls following the Recession.  While internet retailers represent just about 10 percent of retail sales, mall stores like Claire’s, Radioshack, and Pacsun struggled to compete with online demands.

As both department stores and small tenants began to close, vacancy rates began to rise. In 2008, the total vacancy rate for US shopping malls was 7.1 percent, compared with 5.8 percent in 2007. However, there is some evidence that the mall development explosion in the 80s and 90s just created too many stores to survive through economic recession. For example, almost 60 percent of Macy’s closing stores today are within 10 miles of another Macy’s location.  

In contrast, Nordstrom, a department store with higher price-points, has adapting changes in online retail. In addition to opening more locations, Nordstrom generates almost a quarter of its sales online, that rate is higher than its competitors in Macy’s, Kohls, and Jacey Penney who hover around 15 percent. Even with the rise of e-commerce, sash-strapped middle and working class customers have found other avenues to find what they need for lower prices. Ulta Beauty, TJ Maxx, and the Home Depot have moved into fill the needs that these anchors used to fill and continue to open stores.

When anchors close, the smaller tenants close up shop, leading to more dying malls. As of October 2018, closings of anchors like Sears, Bon-Ton, and JC Penney and mall stores like J. Crew, Abercrombie & Fitch,have pushed the total enclosed mall vacancy rate to 9.1%.   However, while B, C and D class malls- or malls in “in less desirable locations and home to less coveted tenants with lower sales per square foot” are vulnerable to vacancy rates and closing, the luxury mall or A class, has shown signs of success.

 

Only the Strong (or Wealthy) Survive

“Within 10 to 15 years the typical U.S. mall, unless completely reinvented, will be seen as a historical anachronism, “said Grove developer Rick Caruso at a National Retail Federation’s annual convention in 2014.

The “typical U.S. mall” had a Macy’s, Boscovs or Dillards. It had parking lots, skylight, and a food court. It catered towards a growing middle class with cash to spend with stores that fit their income bracket. But, Class A malls, or the kind of retail experience that Rick Caruso has built with the Grove: luxury department stores, expensive brands, and fine dining with a walkable “main street.”

While other Class A malls may lack the Caruso’s visual flare, the bare bones of their business plan is similar.  The King of Prussia mall, the second largest mall in the US, underwent a 155,000-square-foot expansion and ushered in luxury tenants like Cartier and Jimmy Choo. While luxury department stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Nordstrom have fewer stores, they have locations in the majority of the the nation’s most successful malls.

According to research by Boenning &  Scattergood, the 20 most valuable malls in the country make more than 21 billion in retail sales. According to Fung Global Retail & Technology, just a fifth of the nation’s luxury malls generate more than 75 percent of mall revenues.

At the same time, income disparities continue to widen in the US. According to Vox, in the years between 1980 and 2018, “the poorest half of the US population has seen its share of income steadily decline, and the top 1 percent have grabbed more.”

“It is very much a haves and have-nots situation,” said D. J. Busch, a senior analyst to the New York Times. Wealthier americans “will keep going to Short Hills Mall in New Jersey or other properties aimed at the top 5 or 10 percent of consumers. But there’s been very little income growth in the belly of the economy.”

Data also shows that millenials have less money than previous generations, as stagnant wages, debt, and rising housing prices cause millenials to spend “nearly $20 less every day than their counterparts roughly 10 years ago,” according to a recent Gallup poll.  And as almost three quarters of millenials prefer to spend more on experiences than material items, the malls have to adapt to that need with expensive renovations.

As anchor stores marketed towards working-to-middle-class clientele close and brick-and-mortar retail demands change, luxury malls remain. If all the business has flowed towards malls with the ability to finance opulence and entertainment, what happens to the communities that called those now dead malls home?  

A Post-Apocalyptic Future

As customers lose their shopping malls, local workers lose their jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department stores have shed 500,00 jobs since 2002, which is almost is almost 18 times more workers than coal mining.

Before the Recession, 2.4 million workers were staffed in retail than manufacturing and health care. However, ten years later,  the education and health services industry employs more than 34.48 Americans, while the retail industry employs 20.3 million.   

 

 

The rise of e-commerce industry has also opened up job operuntities. Amazon and other companies continue to higher more and more workers to staff fufillment positions in warehouses, all the while holding competitions to develop even more effecient robots to work in those warehouses.  

Even as American workers adapt to changing demands, communities will have to adjust from the revenue benefits of brick-and-mortar retail. Montgomery County,PA gets 50 percent of its revenue from the King of Prussia mall, the 2nd largest mall in the US. However, the county is the second wealthiest in the state by income with around a $40,076 per capita income.Other counties across the mid-atlantic region stand to be affected by the loss of the revenue from regional malls and access to jobs. Berks, Columbia, Allegheny and other Pennsylvania counties all have dying malls in 2018 and have per capita incomes less than $29,000.

The labor force participation rate decreased by more than three percentage points from 2000 to 2015. While unemployment rates remain low, fewer workers will have to support a growing retired population in the future. At the same time when other emerging employment opportunities in the gig economy have a technological timestamp, the transformation of the American mall is more than just the end of food courts and your local department store, but also provides insight into the changing nature of work, income, and consumer behavior in the US.

The Problem With Palm Oil

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When wealthy, western nations in Europe joined the United States to enact environmental laws that incentivized the use of vegetable oil in fuels, it was hard to see if there was a crisis on the horizon. These regulations mandated that fuel producers mix in soy, palm, and other vegetable oil with diesel fuels in the name of environmentalism and conservation.

A demand for palm oils soon took off. In response, plantations in nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei rose to meet that need. While  Palm oils can be harvested in other parts of the world, Indonesia and Malaysia produce 86 per cent of the world’s supply. Biodiesel production within the US grew as well- from 250 million gallons in 2006 to more than 1.5 billion gallons in 2016.

Palm oil is cheap to produce- as the plants produce a large amount of oil relative to their size. The oil also has other uses beyond biofuels and can be found in a variety of shampoo, candles, lipstick, bread and chocolate.

While developed nations were able to benefit from the use of alternative fuels, other countries have continued to deal with environmental impacts of the industry. Indonesia has lost over 38,000 square miles of forest in just 30 years, and has become the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the process. Why is that? The forests of Borneo, an island that is home to parts of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the nation of Brunei,  spans large peatland swamps, and the destruction of those forests was roughly equivalent to the opening 70 new, large coal-fired power plants.

The demand for Palm Oil also changed the economic relationship between local farmers and their ownership of the land. The growth of massive plantations has also consolidated land from hundreds of local farmers. While the development land sharing process in Indonesia had been developed to allow local villagers to share in the profits of development, many were faced with intense lobbying, bribery and strong-arming, and missing payments.

Some land agreements missed the consent of local residents altogether. Gusti Gelambong, a resident of the Kalimantan region in Indonesia, explained to the New York Times that microfinance corporations gained control of the land by doctoring lists of signatures on contracts, even using the names of residents who had long passed away.

Because of the land-sharing development agreements, almost a third of Indonesians depend economically on palm oil as nearly half the industry consists of individual landowners. And that is where the conflict between what is economic benefits and environmental costs arises. While the EU parliament has called to phase out palm oil from transport fuel by 2030, countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, so heavily demand on the production of palm oil despite environmental concerns.

“If you pull out biofuel, the whole system will collapse,” said Dono Boestami, the director of Indonesia’s Palm Oil Development Fund.

However, if Indonesia’s production of Palm oil depends on the destruction of forestry that regulates the release of carbon from peatlands, whic collapse will matter more to the global economy: an environmental collapse or an nationally economic one?

Sources:

https://features.propublica.org/palm-oil/palm-oil-biofuels-ethanol-indonesia-peatland/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/02/displaced-villagers-myanmar-at-odds-with-uk-charity-over-land-conservation-tanintharyi

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/palm-oil

http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/oil-palm-the-prodigal-plant-is-coming-home-to-africa-what-does-that-mean-for-forests/

https://features.propublica.org/palm-oil/palm-oil-biofuels-ethanol-indonesia-peatland/

https://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL8N1TG4J1

When Tourism Attacks: Short Term Rentals in New Orleans

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Airbnb has arrived in the Crescent City.  After the city loosened restrictions on short-term rentals, except most of the French Quarter, it only took a license for homeowners to lease out a room.  By December 2017, in one district near the French quarter, one in 10 residences are registered as Airbnbs.Residents need a license to rent out their spaces up to 90 days a year. In October, the New Orleans City Council is moving toward restricting short-term rentals to commercially zoned areas after about 18 months of allowing “temporary” licenses in residential zones.

In February 2018, a report announced that for 10 cities with the largest Airbnb market share in the US, the entry of Airbnb resulted in just 1.3 percent fewer hotel nights booked and a 1.5 percent loss in hotel revenue. But the economic effect of Airbnb goes beyond the Hotel Industry: one study of 100 U.S. studies showed that a 10-percent increase in Airbnbs causes a 0.4-percent increase in rents.

 

Are all short-term rentals Airbnb-style arrangements in the city? Not necessarily.  The Jung Hotel, a newly renovated hotel on Canal Street has leased 111 residences on the hotel’s upper floors to the short-term rental company Sonder, which uses a smartphone application and an online website for booking. Unlike AirBnB, the only people that ever stay in Sonder apartments are guests. None of the 111 units, which had a price tag of $3,900 and $5,900 per month, ever found renters.

 

Sonder applied and received a hotel licence instead a short-term license, exempting them from the future short-term rental regulations.

 

“We’re a deconstructed hotel,” said general manager of Sonder New Orleans to Nola.com. “”It’s a different expectation of service. That’s why I think we’re the future.”

 

 

But what does the economic future look like for New Orleans and short term rentals? Unlike Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, New Orleans is economic profile is different. The city’s tourism industry accounts for nearly 40% of tax revenue. 18 million visitors spent more than $8.7 billion in 2017, according to the New Orleans Advocate. After Hurricane Katrina,  the city’s rebounding Tourism industry helped bring more people back to New Orleans.

 

Airbnb has shared details regarding the positive economic impact of the business, citing that Airbnb guests “stay longer and spend more in diverse neighborhoods throughout the city.” In 2017, Airbnb said that they delivered  $3 million in fees and taxes for short-term rentals for the city.

However, a study released in July tells a slightly different story about how short term rentals are changing the city. The study, which utilized data from  from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census and Airbnb in addition to Yelp reviews, showed that while  white “Airbnb” neighborhoods saw a growth in restaurant employment, restaurants in black or Latino “Airbnb” neighborhoods did not see a similar increase in employment or Yelp engagement.

 

In New Orleans, the parts of the city that have the highest Airbnb concentration are nearly are nearly 50 percent white, compared with 34 percent in the city as a whole.

In study by Loyola University New Orleans professors John D. Levenis, Ph.D., and Mehmet F. Dicle, Ph.D. from 2015 estimated that the Airbnb’s visitors accounted for 4,480 additional jobs that year, with a total value added to the New Orleans economy of 135 million dollars.

Since deregulation in 2017,  locals say that the economic benefits of Airbnb are speeding up the pace of gentrification in the city as well. An investigation by The Lens and HuffPost reported that though tourism lowers crime rates and and cleaner streets, rising rents and home prices are pushing long-time residents out.

“On our block we didn’t have neighbors; we had guests living on our block Thursday to Sunday,” said Christian Rhodes, a New Orleans resident to Huffpost. “Airbnb kind of guaranteed there would be no families.”

 

Sources:

 

https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/business/article_3e30be30-5301-11e8-ac87-2f04ffdf5e01.html

https://unsplash.com/photos/ZofZqMM3UU0

https://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/10/sonder_jung_hotel_short-term_r.html

Brexit’s Big Border Game: An Emerging Crisis in Northern Ireland

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Picture living under the threat of attack within the town you were born in. High walls and towers divided the very streets you walk to school, work, or a place to meet with friends. The threat of bombs or the reality of violence plaguing your every step. Imagine growing up, watching four decades of violence tear your city and country apart.

That was what living in Northern Ireland was 20 years ago. The “Troubles” as they are commonly referred to, were fought primarily between opposing paramilitary groups of either protestant unionists or Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland. Civilians were often caught in crossfire and fell victims to homemade bombs or stray bullets.  

An estimated 30,000 people were imprisoned for paramilitary offenses during the troubles and over 100 peace walls, adorned with sectarian messages and barbed wire are still standing in the city of Belfast.  Though the people of Northern Ireland would do without more literal and physical walls, there’s a chance there might be a few more added in Northern Ireland.

In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. Some hailed the results of the referendum has a chance for the UK to negotiate trade with Europe on its own terms, while others saw the results has a sign of increased xenophobia and warned that the choice would result in unemployment. 

However, the majority of Northern Irish citizens voted to remain in the EU, According to the BBC.  And though the U.K. and the European Union have until March 29, 2019 to set trade and border terms for Brexit, the clock is ticking for a solution for Northern Ireland.

The problem starts with an an almost 20 year old pact known as the Good Friday Agreement. It ended sectarian violence and created an open border between the two countries. Because of this, citizens of Northern Ireland have the option for Republican passports. In the days of the hard, militarized border between both countries, the border was “a frontier of milk smugglers, gun runners and frequent clashes between British soldiers and Irish Republican Army cells”, according to the Washington Post. Today, many Irish citizens feel that there is a sense of relative peace.  

“This city, this country, is like a woman who has given birth,” said Gerry Lynn, an amateur historian of the city Londonderry, to the New York Times. “All the trauma, the pain and the fighting are over. We’ve come out of the Troubles — out of black and white and into color.”

However, in March of Next year, Northern Ireland will leave the EU with the UK, and it’s brother, the Republic of Ireland, will stay, putting the open border policy between the countries up in question.

In response, the EU has offered that the border between the two countries remain the same, the UK is adamant that changes must be made. Regardless, the U.K. and the European Union have until March 29, 2019 to set trade and border terms for Brexit.

While a hard border could stir up memories of a militarized pass in some, it would also disrupt the “frictionless” trade Northern Ireland is able to benefit with its proximity to an EU country. Still, Northern Ireland’s government has created some friction of its own.  It’s government has been in deadlock since January 2017. In affect,  they’ve been kept out of Brexit negotiations and Westminster is set to bargain on their behalf.

In July, Trevor Lockhart, Northern Ireland chair of the Confederation of British Industry expressed frustration with the UK government over the issue.

“We find ourselves in a set of circumstances where the solutions that will work for Northern Ireland economically, don’t work politically,” Lockhart told BBC Inside Business. “And, those that work politically, don’t work economically.”

If the UK and the EU don’t reach a set agreement, a “hard brexit” would take place as all trade would be cut from the EU. According to Vox, this could temporarily halt air travel and make for empty supermarkets. It would also reinstate a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, throwing 20 years of peace into jeopardy.

A hard border between the countries could do more than reignite old grudges from the last half of the 20th century.  It would bring a halt to the movement of goods, capital, services and people that Northern Irish businesses and workers so heavily rely on.  According to the Irish Times, 30 percent of Northern Ireland’s exports or £2 billion were sent to the Republic of Ireland in 2013.  Over 50 percent of Northern Irish exports go to the EU.

These exports are largely food products, live animals, machinery and transport equipment. A lot of these jobs are performed by low-skilled migrant workers that receive passage into Northern Ireland through the European Union, according to a report from the Migrant Advisory Committee.

Still, the rest of the U.K. is Northern Ireland’s single largest primary market for external sales. Nonetheless, nearly three-quarters of exports to Ireland come from small businesses with fewer than 50 employees along the border.

Disruption in cross border-traffic has other ramifications as well. Over 177,000 trucks and 250,000 vans that cross the border for trade every month would be subject to customs duties if a hard border was reinstated, according to the Financial Times. This transport does more than bring goods over the border for sale in  small shops and supermarkets. Bailey’s Irish Cream, for example, is manufactured from resources from Northern Ireland the Republic of Ireland, and involves over 5,000 border crossings per year, according to the Atlantic Council.

Northern Ireland’s economy continues to experience challenges of its own.  Poverty rates in the region are higher than the rest of the U.K. The children of  former prisoners can still be barred from from certain jobs while their parents cannot get public sector positions or insurance. In addition, Northern Ireland has received over £470 million dollars from the U.K. for peace programs in communities that are plagued by both by whispers of sectarian struggles and economic hardship.

On October 11, Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator announced that Customs and VAT checks, as well as compliance checks will not be performed at the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, according to the Irish Times.

However, Barnier was unclear as to the nature of system that would be implemented with the Brexit deal.

“There will be administrative procedures that do not exist today for goods travelling to Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK,” said Barnier.  “Our challenge is to make sure those procedures are as easy as possible and not too burdensome, in particular for smaller businesses.”

That same day, 21 of Northern Ireland’s leading business organizations released a public letter to Theresa May, demanding that she take note of upcoming labor shortages, as migrant forces will be forced to move south to the Republic of Ireland if the current negotiations are approved.

“Unfortunately, it fails to provide the necessary solutions and we believe it is therefore critical to create an immigration policy with sufficient flexibility to address Northern Ireland’s labour needs,” the letter states.

Are the deadly “Troubles” set to return if a solution is not reached? At this point in the negotiations, it’s hard to tell. However it is important to consider the economic ramifications of repeating one dangerous memento from the past: a hard border.

 

Sources Note: All works cited have been properly hyperlinked. Ireland map provided by https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/newsevents/documents/census2016profile6-commutinginireland/Cross_Border_Commuters_2016_v2.pdf.

 

The Wheelbarrow Problem: Lessons in Hyperinflation from Weimar Germany and Venezuela

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Dresses made of paper money. Children playing games with blocks of cash in the street. Hundreds of bank notes for one roll of toilet paper. These are signs of hyperinflation or when the rate of inflation accelerates at such an extradorinaiy rate it renders currency useless and creating intense Economic Disaster.

In August, according to the New York Times, Venezuelan inflation was at 32, 714 percent and rising. Prices were doubling every 26 days on average, according to BBC World News. Coffee prices had soared to 2.5 million Bolivars as Venezuelans resorted to electronic transfers via credit cards to avoid lugging around large amounts of cash.

In an attempt to slow climbing prices, the government issued new banknotes and announced that they would lop off 5 zeros off the currency. The Venezuelan government hopes this change will help deter what economists have grown to call the “wheelbarrow” problem, when prices increase to a point where wheelbarrows of paper money have to be wheeled in to afford the simplest of items.

Examples of hyperinflation in Weimar Germany and current-day Venezuela.

Weimar Germany had a huge ‘wheelbarrow problem’. “A few million marks meant, nothing really. It was just that it meant more lugging,” described artist George Grosz in an interview about his experiences. “The packages of money need to buy the smallest item had long since become too heavy for trouser pockets.”

By November of 1923, it took a trillion marks to make one US dollar, according to PBS.The German mark was rendered essentially, useless. The German people used marks as wallpaper, toys, and fuel for household hearth and returned to bartering with loaves of bread and potatoes.  In order to combat further disaster, the Weimar government lopped off zeros of currency and issued a new currency- the Rentenmark.

However, when it comes to inflation and the economic medicine prescribed as a remedy to that inflation, one variable is important to remember: belief. During the days of hyperinflation, the German people did not trust that inflation would slow down, and spent fast and recklessly. “One had to buy quickly because a rabbit, for example, might cost two million marks more by the time it took to walk into the store,” said Grosz in an account.

Did the German people believe in the new Rentenmark? “I remember,” recounted one German woman, “the feeling of having just one Retenmark to spend….Just to buy something that had a price tag for one Mark was so exciting.” The Retenmark eventually returned German currency to pre World War I exchange rates at 4.2 Rentenmark per US dollar.

Will the Venezuelan people believe in the new currency? The story is more complex than it appears. According to the United Nations, 2.3 million Venezuelans have fled to neighboring countries. Venezuela’s inflation has helped contribute to other problems as well: water shortages, power cuts, and supply shortage caused by lack of foreign investment in Venezuela’s infrastructure, according to the BBC. While the German government of the late 1920’s was able to stabilize both it’s country and it’s economy, Venezuela will have to solve these issues in addition to it’s wheelbarrow problem.

 

Sources:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36319877

https://search-proquest-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/hnplatimes/docview/161560392/fulltextPDF/3D5CFD9C41B047ABPQ/1?accountid=14749

https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/economics/personal-accounts-inflation-years-economics-1919-1924-inflation

#Trending: What can fashion and style trends tell us about the economy?

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You can find economic indicators everywhere. From plastic surgery to the number of unclaimed bodies at your local morgue, to even the ‘intensity’ of marine corps advertisements, economists have found countless ways to chart the economic growth of the United States in recent years. However, for the last century of so, researchers and experts have found an area that can tell us quite a lot about the economy: fashion.

For example, let’s start with shoes. According to IBM, The “High Heel Index” works like this: the better the economy is going, the lower the heel. The 20th century echoed this theory quite nicely- in the 1970s, large platform heels and boots were in style, replacing the short, kitten-heeled sandals of the 60s. By the time of the “dot-com bust” at the end of the century, the low, block heels of the 1990s were replaced by high, stilettos popularized in shows like Sex and the City.

Social media analysis by IBM found that heel height peaked at 7 inches around the end of 2009- which according to the World Bank, the US GDP was at its lowest point. By 2011, when US GDP ceased it’s steady incline, heel height had fallen to around 2-3 inches.

The relationship between the strength of the United States economy and fashion extends to male style trends as well. According to Vox, beards can signify the triumph of American capitalism and innovation as they were popular with both Gilded-Age titans of industry and “characteristically disheveled figures” of the tech look like Steve Jobs.

However, it’s important to remember the significance of historical and cultural context when tracing the relationship between fashion and economic trends. For example, in the 1920s and 1930s hemlines were a much better tell at economic health. According to ABC News, economist George Taylor took note of how in the 1920s or the “The Age of the Flapper”, women took to higher hemlines to show off their stockings. By the time of the Great Depression, those stockings had gotten pricier, and women lowered their skirts to hide bare legs.

However, some fashion experts say the Hemline theory doesn’t quite add up. Valerie Steele, acting director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, told ABC News: “Hemlines were starting to come down in ’27 and that was two years before the market crash.”

So is it possible to use fashion as a way to interpret the economy? Fashion, like any other industry, is certainly part of it. As for heel heights, hemlines, and beards- we’ll have to leave it to economists and historians from the future to decide.

Sources:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp

https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/3/17/14939608/beard-popularity-economics

https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35985.wss

The 40 most unusual economic indicators

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86787&page=1