Fiona McCade: Too poor to be butterfly bright

ONE hot summer's day – so hot that it must be good few years ago now – I overheard two young male office workers talking. They were sitting in the park on their lunch break, watching the women go past in their lightest, brightest summer finery, and one of them said to the other: "It's great when the sun shines and they all come out, like butterflies."

Sadly, it looks like that poetic young gentleman won't be getting his fix of pretty frocks this year, because according to the latest sales figures from some of the top high street stores, bright colours have been among the first casualties of the credit crunch.

The chief executive of Asda recently admitted: "Two or three years ago, we could sell very bold colours. Someone would wear it a few times and that would be it. Now they want muted colours. They're saying 'I need things I can wear much longer'."

A quick glance around the streets of Edinburgh seems to bear out this view. Last Friday, walking around the centre of town, I must have passed about 20 other women in almost exactly the same boring, safe, jeans-and-brown-top combo that I was wearing. It felt like nobody had the energy – or perhaps the financial wherewithal – to emerge from their drab cocoon and flaunt their butterfly colours.

The joke is, of course, that despite our financial problems, we're obviously still managing to buy clothes. It's not as though we've lost all sense of consumer self-respect and resorted to wearing some of those brightly coloured dresses still lurking at the back of the wardrobe from a couple of years ago. No recycling of the feel-good years for us! If we're going to be depressed, we're going to do it right, and brand new.

It just seems a bit strange that we're not even trying to cheer ourselves up with a splash of colour. It's like we're punishing ourselves twice – once for buying dull colours that exacerbate our gloomy mood and again by spending hard-earned money on something that reminds us how miserable we are.

Wall Street traders have always claimed to be able to monitor America's economic health by the length of hemlines – the longer the better, apparently, although that theory is well and truly scotched by the booming, mini-skirted Sixties.

But yes, it's fair enough to assume that in difficult times, people will invest in boring but enduring classics (the fashion world's equivalent of the low-risk cash ISA), but even if there is a particular correlation between dullness of financial outlook and dullness of clothing, is that so terrible?

One of the statistics Asda produced, as an example of how we're shunning colour in 2008, was the drop in sales of coloured tights. The chain has sold 52 per cent fewer pairs of brightly coloured ones than in the same period last year, while sales of black tights have rocketed by 35 per cent.

Is that applause I hear? If coloured tights are a barometer of the nation's optimism, give me pessimism any day. And if the result of having less money is that our legs look slimmer and longer, and the fashion for dressing up like Pippi Longstocking on acid is over, hooray for the credit crunch.

Dark clothes always make the wearer look more elegant. So what if we're feeling poor? We can still look good in our little black suits and crisp, white shirts. If one of the side-effects of the financial crisis is that we get a little unexpected sophistication thrust upon us, that can't be such a bad thing, surely.

Summer clothes can be a minefield of fashion disaster, but you can't go wrong with a few smart, plain, shadowy shades. And after all, it's only for this year.

If you're really finding the going tough, you can strut out in lime-green lace and orange tights next summer and we all promise not to say a word.

But as things stand, with everybody suffering from some form of Seasonal Affective Disorder due to the lack of sunshine, what's the point of floating about in our best, butterfly dresses when we're just going to get rained on from a great height?

And unless you've spent a great deal of time on a sunbed recently, have you really got a good enough tan to be able to carry off really vivid colours? Or will they leave you looking as washed-out as your bank account?

We've got a nasty combination of the financial and the summertime blues, so we may as well wear them – but nothing brighter than navy, please.