Angelina Jolie

Seriously, Wall street ought to pay a lot of attention to Fashion.  ”flush times mean higher hemlines” Forget the twins, look at Angelina’s hemlines.

Talk to Rachel Zoe, the fashion and now hedge fund arbiter.

She knew long before that the stock market was going down - she was already wearing her maxi dresses and muumuus.

According to Suzy Menkes, their look offers an eerie parallel with the 1970s - the last time that recession and plummeting hemlines were in unison.

Fashion is always a mirror of society. Thus, in a strange forecast of what the Federal Reserve discovered in the banking system, over-exposure and total transparency in the wardrobe has been followed by complex cover-ups and a downward spiral.

Fashion designers now seem clairvoyant. This summer’s collections - shown last October, when the stocks were still riding high on a bull market - were filled with long skirts. From classic Chanel to cool Christopher Kane, dresses were long and languorous or a waterfall of frills - but always scraping the floor. Fashion had turned its back on the Paris Hilton girlie glitz: short, sheer dresses; sequined sparkles; and any-color-as-long-as-it-is-pink.

In Russia, where the economy is expanding and ostentatious consumption is the height of fashion, long skirts are nowhere to be seen, the skirts are high and brief.

War always brings clothing back to the status quo, according to James Laver, the historian who traced the rise and fall of waistlines as symbolic of social upheaval in his sweeping study “Costume: The Arts of Man,” published in 1963. The end of the Second World War (and the arrival of Christian Dior) brought waists and hemlines back to “normal.” But as soon as the economy expanded in the 1960s, up and away went miniskirts - only to crash with the financial troubles in the 1970s. And so the graph of skirt lengths has continued in tandem with Western economies with the 15-year run of bull markets reflected in short-and-sweet  dresses. (IHT)

Of course, Angelina is pregnant and may have swollen feet or varicose veins she is trying to cover but that would not help this story, would it?