Pinchings and Norms of Scaled Triangular Matrices

Suppose U is an upper-triangular matrix, and D a nonsingular diagonal matrix whose diagonal entries appear in nondescending order of magnitude down the diagonal. It is proved that $$\|D^{-1}UD\|\ge\|U\|$$ for any matrix norm that is reduced by a pinching. In addition to known examples -weakly unitarily invariant norms - we show that any matrix norm defined by $$\| A \|^{\underline{\underline {{\rm def}}} } \mathop {\max }\limits_{x \ne 0,y \ne 0} {{{\mathop{\rm Re}\nolimits} (x^*Ay)} \over {\phi (x)\psi (y)}},$$ where θ (.) and y (.) are two absolute vector norms, has this property. This includes l p operator norms as a special case.