Major fashion trend cycles, and how they keep coming back

Note: I’m going to try to go through all the various fashion styles, in separate blog posts for clarity and convenience. Once I’m done, I will try to write a better version of this analysis. Try to see this post as the first draft of a bigger thesis that might take years to complete.

If you are as interested as I am in fashion history, you might have noticed that some fashion trends, or even entire movements, seem to come back in a cyclical manner.

In fact, some analysts call it the “20 year rule”, a general concept that a trend popular right now will be brought back by a designer (or several) in two decades from now. There’s an aspect of nostalgia and lack of new ideas in this, of course, but it is often proven true.

James Laver (1899-1975) went a tad further and created an entire chart…