Devil Take The Hindmost by Edward Chancellor (pg. 46)

The rise of the stock market in the early 1690s was accompanied by a fashion for increasingly extravagant ladies’ headdresses, which climbed in height from the early 1690s until they peaked at over seven feet in 1695 (the year the stock market crashed). This prompted Sir Richard Steele to remark that “Stocks have risen and fallen in Proportion to Head-Dresses”–an observation which anticipates the connection made between women’s rising hemlines and the stock market in the 1920s (what has become known as the “hemline theory of stock prices”).