Early reports put this year’s September U.S. issue of Vogue at 584 ad pages, up from last year’s 532 pages. As an indicator of the economy, it’s a good recovery sign looking back to 2009’s 429 pages which was a huge drop from 2008’s 674. Since I’ve been tracking this data for several years now, I decided to do a very amateur analysis and made a simple chart comparing the ad pages in September to the Dow Jones Industrial Average in July of the same year. I picked July so that I would have a data point for 2011 (although the month isn’t over so it’s even sketchier!). A fancier graph would include more Dow data points in a year, but this is good enough for my little amusement. And I actually have 20 years of September Vogue issues, but I’m not up for counting all ad pages of the issues I don’t have data for! Anyway, there’s a good correlation when you put the DOW and page count numbers onto the same scale.