It is almost a century since the US economist George Taylor came up with the revolutionary “hemline index” – the idea that when the economy is good, women’s skirts get shorter, and when times are hard hemlines fall. Now the fashion world has finally offered up an alternative indicator of the country’s economic state.

Cropped, bobbed or floor-sweeping, the length of women’s hair may no longer be seen as a result of the vagaries of fashion, but as an accurate barometer of the nation’s wealth.

Japanese researchers have found that when economies are doing well, women wear their hair long; when there is a slump, they cut it short. While many may be sceptical of forging a link between the disparate worlds of finance and fashion, that the current vogue for short hair comes at a time when the British economy is experiencing its biggest downturn for decades is proving too much of a coincidence for some to ignore.

There could definitely be a pattern in the UK too,” said Susanna Sallstrom-Matthews, cultural economist at the University of Cambridge and author of The Consumption of Beauty. “People enjoy fewer material pleasures in periods of recession, so want more visual pleasures, and there’s more variation among short haircuts than long.”

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