Is It True That Style Shifts Every Seven Years?
Designer Elizabeth Hawes quietly created made-to-order beautiful, functional clothes for the women of New York from the late 1920s through the 1960s, but her name has not survived as well as her philosophy. In Hawes’ memoir, Fashion is Spinach, published in 1938, she explains that what she strived for in her work was style (or taste) in lieu of fashion (or product)—a very contemporary mindset. “Style is that thing which, being looked back upon after a century, gives you the fundamental feeling of a certain period in history,” she wrote. “It only changes as often as there is a real change in the point of view and lives of the people for whom it is produced.” Style is a slave to function; fashion can only exist as its sales-hungry parasite.
In Hawes’ era, French haute couture was the foundation of the fashion industry. Twice a year, designers like Jean Patou, Coco Chanel, and Jeanne Lanvin presented new seasonal collections in Paris. There, individual clients could purchase pieces that were then custom-made for them, whereas department stores overseas could buy the rights to reproduce them. Hawes spent the first years of her career stationed in Paris helping to illegally copy these looks with cheaper materials, the likes of which were then sold at a lower price point—essentially a much more elaborate version of today’s dupe. Herein, Hawes would say, lies the spectrum of style to fashion. “Lanvin and Chanel are fundamentally occupied with selling style,” Hawes explained. “The manufacturer and the department store are primarily occupied with selling fashion.”
Hawes wanted to debunk the idea that beautiful clothes need to change every season. For instance, she discusses the archetype of a customer who can’t seem to yearn for new clothes because an Elizabeth Hawes dress satisfies her every need, season after season, year after year. In the final chapter of Fashion is Spinach, she outlines her ideal world, in which skilled designers win over mass production and customers’ needs are superior to seductive trends. Those businesses then “wouldn't have to worry about changing fashion, because there wouldn't be any fashion, just style,” Hawes argued. “And style only changes every seven years or so”—not every season.
I read this book more than six months ago, and I can’t get that last sentiment out of my head. It seems many others in my line of work have been reading it, too–there have been countless fashion writers, Substackers, and trend forecasters citing Hawes lately.
I’m not sure how arbitrary the seven-year theory was back then, as Hawes never dissects that number specifically, but it’s one that connotes restlessness in any long-term relationship, be that with a shoe or a spouse. The trope came from a 1955 Marilyn Monroe film The Seven Year Itch (dated after this book’s first publishing), in which a married man becomes so infatuated with Monroe that he plans to cheat on his wife of seven years. Culturally spun as it may be, the theory has since been somewhat psychologically proven. According to Cleveland Clinic, divorces do tend to spike around the seven- or eight-year mark once the honeymoon phase has fully worn off. That’s the kind of sartorial consumption Hawes endorses: a long-term relationship over a fleeting affair, but she understands the inevitable wandering eye after a few years of commitment.
“We've been dressing the same way for such a long time now,” says Washington Post fashion critic Rachel Tashjian. “Everything is oversized and tailored—quite practical—so in terms of that seven-year rule, it's really hard to say.” We spoke moments before Frances Howie’s debut as creative director at American luxury brand Fforme, which has become known for timeless yet unique silhouettes that prioritize craft. “It's great that we're talking at this show,” Tashjian said, “because I think that's what Frances is trying to do, right? She wants to create real clothes for a real person. And I think that's what so many designers seem to be talking about this season.”
Call it “quiet luxury,” if you dare, but wearability is in and has been since the pandemic underscored our desire for comfort. Brands who design real clothes for real women—albeit very stylish and affluent ones—like The Row, Khaite, and Toteme have experienced massive financial success in recent years despite their high prices. “It does feel like a sort of synthesis. Designers keep showing it, and then people keep wearing it,” says Tashjian, who is admittedly itching for something new. But “when designers are talking as they are now about making a coat that you can have for 10 years,” she wonders, “how are they navigating that with having to have a business that makes clothes twice a year? It's a valid question.”
The business side of the industry is built on seasonal collections—and nowhere is this more evident than fashion week. There’s fall and spring, of course, but now we have pre-fall and resort in between. And each calls for a new debut of clothing—and shoes, accessories, bags, jewelry, and more. It’s all well and good to condemn seasonality, but unfortunately fashion brands have to sell clothes to survive.
Like other independent labels, Olivia Villanti, founder of Chava Studio, a small made-to-order shirting business out of Mexico City, doesn’t follow a traditional seasonal fashion calendar. Her shirts are made with the utmost care. Prices begin in the $300s and reflect high quality and slim margins. She knows her customer is more interested in style than fashion; it’s the closest brand I could think of to Hawes’ business. She also knows that, with these core principles in place, her business will never grow astronomically. And she’s made peace with that. “I think if you do anything very well, you can sell it honestly, but it's very, very hard to do either way—though fashion is especially hard if quality and sustainability are important to you.”
Her cropped tuxedo shirt, a subtle riff on the classic style she launched with, is probably her most “fashion” offering. But her sartorial timeline reflects an interest in highly committed relationships. The cropped silhouette, she admits, may go out of fashion in seven years, but she hopes her core pieces will never do so. “Our clients come to us for great shirts and suits, but I think they mostly come to access a sensibility steeped in tailoring which, for me, is always stylish. Cuts and rises and proportions change, but something like tailoring is a forever-chic style play.”
Style and seasonality aren’t necessarily counterintuitive—and that paradoxical sentiment doesn’t have to be rooted in tailoring either. (Hawes was mostly a dressmaker.) “The designers whose works I admire the most operate from a blueprint of founding principles,” says fashion writer Tasnim Ahmed. “For [Miuccia] Prada,” who has helmed Prada since 1978, “it’s a knee-length skirt. For Dries Van Noten,” who launched his label in 1986, “it’s a bustle-esque mid-shin skirt, which reflects either needs or what clients respond to, and then they imbue it with desire and intellect and whatever else is informing their own style. To throw out the whole blueprint every few months…are these clothes even being made for humans?”
Jennifer Alfano, former magazine editor, jewelry designer, and founder of The Flair Index Substack, where she dissects the minutiae of personal style, is unsure whether seven is the magic number when it comes to style. “I do think there is an evolution every decade of how people dress, or at least there used to be. Because very little is taboo today”—women can not only bare their ankles in proper society, but they call bras shirts and leggings pants—“there isn't evolution as much as mass diversity of design,” says Alfano.
If style changes with the world around it, Hawes would think the fashion industry in 2025 was moving at turbo speed. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram react to political and pop cultural shifts by the minute, so very few trends are as definitive as they were in prior decades. Instead, microtrends live and die with the longevity of a mayfly. In the 1920s, Hawes had to sketch a haute couture gown and then take it to be recreated in a process nearly as slow as that of the ateliers. Now, fast fashion brands need about two weeks to move product from ideation to the store floor.
Today, a committed relationship with your wardrobe is even more difficult. So Ahmed directed me toward friends in lieu of spouses for the style analogy in question; a study by Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst noted that seven years is the average length of most friendships. Friendship is another thing steeped in an environmental context. Like Hawes noted of style, the friends you surround yourself with are very much at the whim of where you live, what you consume, and how you spend your time. You don’t have just one friend, nor do you purchase just one sweater. And according to Mollenhorst's research, only 30% of friends remain close after a period of seven years.
“I'm still mostly drawn to combinations of suiting, sweaters, tees, and vintage Levi’s,” says Alfano of her persistent personal style. She knows her foundation, her blueprint. Perhaps those forever pieces make up 30% of her wardrobe, but like anyone, she’s not married to that—nor is she immune to the sway of the latest seasonal collection. “A new pair of barrel-leg jeans or jellies from The Row add a freshness to what I have in my closet.” Whatever cycle fashion ultimately subscribes to in 2025, Hawes was certainly right about one thing: style is something we should always be wedded to.
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