Unemployment Is Hot

Unemployment becomes some women, it turns out.

It’s a trend we first noticed while browsing at Anthropologie, a store not particularly suited to the jobless – except, that is, for its array of stylish aprons.

Aprons are apparently au courant, especially for the legion of women settling into unemployment.

All these newly jobless women are embracing the demands of home economics, tying on aprons that aren’t just practical but also pretty.

Seriously, these are not your mama’s aprons.

The prints are punchy but also sweet, skirting the overplayed irony of vintage frills and ruffles but in the end avoiding the overwrought “Goodwill-is-cool” trend.

The silhouette is not so much a throwback, but a flash forward – good-looking homemakers aren’t a thing of the past but rather a sign of the times.

In fact, it’s the rumpled nine-to-fiver who is the throwback, because messy and flustered is out; primped and together is in.

Speaking of primping, hair makeovers are another aspect of this “hot-for-home-ec” theme.

Requests for blonde dye jobs have skyrocketed – at least in Britain, where all the worthy fashion trends begin.

British Hairstylist of the year (?) Andrew Barton thinks he can explain the “gold rush.”

“I don’t believe it is purely a coincidence that there’s been a huge sales rise in blonde hair products during these tough financial times. Many of my female clients say they feel more confident, more youthful and more attractive when they go blonde and they get more attention.”

That women are choosing salon-intensive blonde at a time when they can least afford the frequent touch-ups is either a testament to their irresponsibility or an indication of a reemergence of gender roles.

We’ll go with the second possibility, since that’s the one that makes us feel warm and fuzzy.

Perchance the decision to go blonde is a bid to secure security by getting a man.

As everyone becomes increasingly dispensable at work, it’s likely that, as in times past, financial stability will depend on women foregoing employment. That would cut job-seekers in, like, half, ensuring that in most households someone is employed – which, together with the disappearance of childcare costs (that’s what moms are for), would almost eradicate financial chaos at both the micro and macro levels.

So, going blonde may just be the millennial manifestation of a woman’s primal drive to create security through marital mutualism – to, in other words, find her way into one those aprons that are suddenly coveted.

Toward that end, unemployment may make a rather unexpected contribution.

Recent research suggests that the stress of working spurs a woman’s body to create testosterone, a hormone which makes the body look less curvy.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan studied women’s waist-to-hip ratios to calculate trends in the body types of working women versus those who are unemployed. From the Telegraph article:

Medical studies have previously shown that a curvy waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 – where the waist circumference is 70 per cent of the hip circumference or lower – is associated with higher fertility and lower rates of chronic disease.

However, Professor Cashdan found that this ratio is rarely found among women who are under pressure to rely on their own resources to support themselves and their families. Instead, she discovered an average waist to hip ratio of 0.8.

Unemployment, then, appears to be make women blonder, curvier, and more stylish – and consequently, that much more close to being “keepers.”

Those are all consequences of unemployment that we can get down with.

Men’s fashion, for its part, is also shifting toward a look of accessibility and openness as the economy sours.

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that designers are creating flashy-colored clothing. It’s a bid, say some designers, to entice purchases among men who, in tough times, won’t spring for the neutral designs that have become de rigueur in men’s fashion.

Judging from the pictures in the WSJ article, we’re loving the citrus punch of the bold colors. It’s a look that’ll complement these guys’ newly beautified wives.

*Author’s note: Our founding editor insisted that it was our journalistic responsibility to model our aprons, curves, and blonde wigs, and to post the photos. That instruction was summarily dropped when we demanded reciprocity, insisting that he pose for pictures in the fluorescent Calvin Klein ensemble featured in the WSJ article.

**leg pic: the amazing (and employed) lisa varga.