Fashion Meets Finance: Gold is THE Trend for Spring

• Joshua M Brown
• April 2nd, 2009

If I'm on a flight and forget to bring my own reading material, I'll pretty much read anything, even the ingredients on a candy bar wrapper.  I recently resorted to sharing a nearby girl's fashion magazine stash and about halfway through Cosmopolitan (don't laugh), I noticed something interesting:  Every fashion house on earth is doing Gold this year, from head to toe!

For posterity, I'm a happily-married man and I very rarely concern myself with women's fashion trends, but there's clearly a connection to be made here.  Gold is the safety trade and its the anti-inflation trade as well.  Its what people are buying and selling furiously and the commodity's price is sitting near multi-decade highs at a time when almost every asset class is sitting near decade lows.  It should come as no surprise then to see gold fever spill over into the realm of couture.   Gold is now all over the runways in Europe and in clothing boutiques and department stores around the world.

I hear its being called a "Gilty Pleasure"...I know, lame, but you get the point.

Of all the fashion houses, Ralph Lauren has clearly taken the gold trend to the limit, with a safari/ gold motif throughout their season's aesthetic (yes, I used the word motif...still happily married).

They say that when the economy gets good, the hemlines on the ladies' skirts get shorter.  I suppose when the economy freaks everyone out and into gold, the skirts get gold-colored, as do the shoes, the bags, the dresses etc.

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