Perceived Waist-to-Hip Ratio Predicts Traits Judgements in Pre-Contemporary European Portraits of Clothed Women

Women with a lower waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) are consistently judged as more attractive, a finding replicated across diverse populations and methods. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference may reflect selection for cues of female reproductive potential, as WHR reliably tracks both age and parity. However, virtually all previous studies present nude or minimally clothed bodies in highly standardised conditions, leaving open whether WHR-based judgements generalise to more ecologically valid settings and whether they extend beyond attractiveness to the reproductive traits WHR is a cue of. We addressed both questions by analysing 608 painted female figures from European portraits (1650–1950), depicting fully clothed women in visually complex and minimally sexualised settings. Online Prolific observers (N = 1,525) independently estimated the body shape, attractiveness, age, and likelihood of previous childbirth from either the body or the face of the painted characters. Perceived WHR strongly predicted all three trait judgements: lower WHR was associated with higher attractiveness, younger perceived age, and lower perceived likelihood of previous childbirth. These relationships persisted after controlling for posture, body orientation, perceived weight, perceived facial age, artistic school, and date of the artwork. Our findings show that WHR-based perceptual heuristics are not artefacts of the narrow stimulus conditions used in prior research but persist in visually complex, clothed, and historically diverse depictions of women. They further suggest that fashion styles that exaggerate WHR may have functioned as strategic amplifiers of reproductively relevant cues, with implications for theories of mate choice, social signalling, fashion history and cultural evolution.