Mathematics Suggest That Fashion Is on a 20-Year Cycle
If you’ve taken a look at Instagram or TikTok recently, you’ve noticed that initially, fashion trends made a resurgence. Skinny jeans are out, baggy jeans are in. The same goes for the baby t-shirts, chunky heels and trucker hats that characterized the style of 2000. It’s not a total surprise, fashion is cyclical, right?
Well, thanks to new research presented today at the World Physics Summit 2026, we have some cold, hard data to back up that claim.
Two Northwestern University mathematicians, Emma Zajdela and Daniel Abrams, wanted to take an unbiased, data-driven look at fashion trends, but first they had to make their own changes. Using custom tools, the team measured the hemlines, necklines and waists of women’s dresses from the University of Rhode Island’s commercial pattern archives and runway collections. They then transformed the designs – around 37,000 of them from 1869 to today – into digital data to track their evolution over the decades.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has developed such a comprehensive and accurate database of fashion metrics spanning over a century,” Zajdela said in a statement.
Read more: “Dress for Scalable Success”
To dig deeper into the data, the team built a mathematical model based on the tension between wanting to conform to styles and wanting to stand out. “Over time, this constant desire to differentiate ourselves from the recent past causes styles to change,” Abrams explained. “The system inherently wants to oscillate, and we see these cycles in the data.”
They found that the popularity of styles waxed and waned over time, peaking roughly every two decades. Hemlines showed one of the most austere cycles, with short flapper dresses in the 1920s giving way to more modest styles in the 1950s before the explosion of mini skirts in the 1960s.
But from the 1980s, things started to change. Instead of one dominant style, a wide range of hem lengths appeared in the data.
“In the past, there were two options: short dresses and long dresses,” Zajdela said. “In recent years there are more options: very short dresses, floor-length dresses and midi dresses. There is an increase in variation over time and less conformity.”
In other words, fashion trends are becoming more and more fragmented, with multiple niches flourishing simultaneously. If nothing else, it’s a great reason to put off cleaning out your closet for another 20 years.
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Main image: Emma Zajdela / Daniel Abrams
