This study tests the proposition that the fashion process is accelerating by utilizing quantitative data and time series analysis. Metrical measurements of persistent features of women's formal evening dress (skirt length, skirt width, waist length, waist width, decolletage length, decolletage width) are taken from high fashion magazines and averaged to create yearly means, thereby creating a time series of 192 years. A methodology is described which deals with the magnitude of change from one year to the next in the means of each of the dress features. The velocity of the fashion process is found to be not accelerating in women's formal evening dress but rather is highly variable and episodic. What does exhibit a significant increase through time is the within-year variance of the variables.

Using time series analysis and systems theoy it is possible to translate Kroeber's idea of a cultural configuration and its processual consequences into a less ambiguous model. By employing a mathematical formulation certain features of stylistic change in women 's dress become evident: it is stochastic/probabilistic in nature and it is in stable equilibrium. The sequence of women's fashions through time would appear to anse from simultaneous operation of inertia, cultural continuity, a rule system of esthetic proportions, and an inherently unpredictable element. [culture process, fashion, stylistic change, systems analysis, time series analysis]

Recently, Hamblin and Pitcher (1980) have attempted to buttress the class conflict explanation of the Classic Maya collapse using a series of mathematical models. However, despite the exceptionally good agreement between these mathematical relations and the empirical data, the same cannot be said for the fit between the conceptual and mathematical models. The relations employed are very general, so much so as to often be isomorphic with very different processes. In one case at least, the same model appears to be consistent with several entirely distinct explanations of the collapse, and other mathematical readings of the monument data are by no means precluded. While these particular mathematical relationships fail to make a very strong case that the Classic Maya collapse was engendered primarily through peasant revolt and class conflict, which was very possibly Hamblin's and Pitcher's underlying aim, the attempt to cast explanations of the collapse into mathematical form points the way for the next generation of collapse models.

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