Fashion Future: Who Predicts Fashion Trends
Broad shoulders, as from the eighties. Color fur. Black glossy leather, which certainly would have liked the heroes of the "Matrix". Azure blue color. This is just a small list of trends that, judging by the recent fashion weeks, will determine how we will dress in six months.
To a person who is not familiar with the mechanisms of the fashion industry, it may seem that the formation of trends is the result of the action of the general unconscious. They say that designers are looking for inspiration, each in his own, and then in some incredible way their creative lines intersect. In fact, everything is much more prosaic. The return of one or another fashionable decade, the popularity of a certain color (and sometimes even a particular hue), the actual cut is the merit of the work of not only the designer departments of the brands, but also the people who are called trend-hunters. Those who know exactly what we want to buy in six months or even a couple of years.
Knowing what your customer will want in the future, you can make a product that he will surely like - and earn much more
Predicting trends is the name of the work of people whose task is to find new trends, moods and desires of society. Of course, such analysts work not only in fashion: trend-hunting today is one of the most sought-after professions in any field, from pharmaceuticals to advertising and the entertainment industry. Giant companies - from Coca-Cola to Forever 21 - spend millions on consulting specialists on trends or trendbooks with the necessary information (Forever 21 does have its own staff of trend hunters). Why do this? The answer is simple: knowing what your customer wants in the future, you will be able to make a product that he will surely like - and earn much more.
In the fashion industry there are several major trend prediction agencies (they are also called forcasting), whose names are familiar to every major and not very brand. One of the most famous "soothsayers" is Lidevius Edelkurt, who has been working in this field since the 1970s. Its Trend Union agency cooperates with clients not only from the fashion world: at one time, Edelkurt advised, for example, Coca-Cola Corporation on how Sprite should position itself in the market with the advent of a new, younger generation of customers. If you examine the interview with Ledivy, it will become clear that her work is not a peek at the magic ball at all to see the color of the season in it. Edelcourt with the team explores behavioral patterns and on this basis makes assumptions in which direction the fashion will move in the coming years.
Say, a few years ago, she told us that society is becoming more and more infantile, falls into permanent nostalgia for childhood, thereby creating a protective cocoon around itself. Unfavorable environment and endless stress make us remember the favorite escapist technique from childhood: "I am in the house, I can not see." The result is the mass appearance of so-called kidalts, films about superheroes, cartoons made not only for children, but at the same time a whole heap of fashionable trends: cropped tops and sweaters, things with inscriptions and "not serious" pictures and so on.
Another important player in this field is the London-based WGSN agency, founded in 1998. It also works not only in the field of fashion, but offers fashion clients a full package: consultation for a short-term (two years) or long-term (from five years) periods (by the way, all trend predictors work, by the way,) market, a library of images that designers can use to create collections. The bonus, in addition to the full report, which, as you can guess, is worth a lot, anyone can order an email subscription: the WGSN team regularly shares interesting findings and articles on current trends and how they will affect fashion in the future.
There is also LS: N Global, a subsidiary of the Future Laboratory consulting company. Three years ago, LS: N Global made a long-term prediction of the "Flat Age Society" phenomenon, that is, literally, "a society without age." As stated in the report, the biological age now does not matter: the elderly are increasingly seeking to maintain an active lifestyle, travel and wear clothing "for the young." We already see the echoes of this macro-trend: in recent years, there’s only talk that fashion has stopped paying attention to age, and if brands and magazines have discovered for themselves a new brave world of models over 25 years old, the American Apparel advertising campaign with 62-year-old Jackie O'Shaughnessy or shooting 48-year-old Christy Turlington for Valentino examples.
A large pool of people from a wide variety of fields collaborates with each forcasting agency: sociologists, sociocultural anthropologists, marketers, and so on. In addition, the companies themselves in each strategically important city (say, New York, Berlin, Tokyo) have their own “special agents” who explore the environment and people around and notice local trends - whether it is the manner of local residents to turn, not trim jeans, or the sudden appearance of many bakeries with cinnabon buns.
For example, street style is not the one we used to see in reports from fashion weeks, but authentic, everyday is an important source of information for trend hunters. As well as Instagram and other digital platforms - in WGSN there is even a department that separately studies the millennials who actively use them. All these experts gather at the appointed time at the appointed place to share with each other the results of the research. Literally everything - not only about art or everyday culture, but also about politics, science, modern technologies.
It is only from the outside that it seems that the change in fashion trends is like a chaotic Brownian movement and is not subject to logic. In fact, this is a process that reacts sharply to the mood in the world. Nobody knows if Christian Dior would have become a legend in his lifetime, he offered his new look five years earlier or later. But he felt in time what women wanted after the war, and that is why he wrote his name in history.
The change of fashion trends does not look like a chaotic Brownian movement - in fact, this is a process that reacts sharply to the mood in the world
Of course, the designers of the 1960s did not have trendbooks, which did not prevent them from inventing clothes for new, younger customers inspired by dreams of space. After half a century, nothing has changed in this process - just intermediaries have appeared who now do some of the work for designers.
In parallel with the study of the general picture of the world, another part of the specialists conducts more applied research: for example, trendhunters working with fabrics and materials will learn about the latest technological developments in this area, and those who specialize in color will find shades that will be popular in subsequent years. years old. All this, of course, is associated with general social trends. For example, the active development of innovative materials - waterproof, allowing the body to breathe - are being conducted against the background of the increasing interest of people in fitness and a healthy lifestyle. The trend for athleisure and elements of sports style, as you might guess, also came from there.
After analyzing all the data obtained about materials, colors, habits of millennials and their parents, political sentiments and economic forecasts, the agency compiles trendbooks - catalogs that describe future trends with a prospect of at least two years ahead. Designers and marketers of brands are offered not only recommendations on which shade of red will be best sold in several seasons, but quite definite predictions regarding themes and style.
Here is an interesting example. In 2013, the Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibition opened at the New York Metropolitan Museum. About the topic of the exhibition was known two years before, that is, already in 2011, forcasting agencies could predict a heightened interest in the style of punk. As a result, punk became one of the main trends at fashion weeks in the fall of 2013 — one can hardly blame this fact on the sudden mass nostalgia of designers for the 1970s subculture.
Some trends are less specific. For example, agencies can give guidance in the spirit of "because of fatigue from the increasingly aggressive globalization and concrete boxes of megacities, people will strive to get closer to nature." Designers can interpret this information in different ways: someone decides to hit a floral print, someone - to make a bet on natural materials of natural shades. No one perceives the trendbooks and the tips of the soothsayers as a direct guide to action - rather, it is a vector in which each brand can move in accordance with its views.
So, for the spring-summer 2015 season, the WGSN agency marked the “story 2.0” trend as one of the main ones, suggesting the desire of people to go back to basics, whatever that may mean. In January 2015, Alessandro Michele showed his first collection for Gucci, completely redrawing the style of the brand for Milan vintage shops and the fashion of the late 1960s - early 1970s. Due to the breadth of coverage (“history 2.0” - is it about manual labor instead of machine or apparel of a 19th century sample?), Similar trends are more tenacious than the same punk. Designers have a wide field for work, and buyers have a large selection. Take the same course on historicism: if a few seasons ago it was a curtsey in the direction of recent fashionable decades, then for the spring-summer 2017, designers turned to a more ancient past - medieval costumes or images of colonists from the middle of the XIX century.
However, even professional trend predictors are not always right. In February 2016, Romney Jacob, a trendgunter from WGSN, was interviewed on the Observer portal. In it, she literally says the following: "The idea of luxury has changed - now it is considered a move to wear the logo of expensive brands or status bags." It all made sense at the beginning of 2016 (unless, of course, taking into account luxury consumers from Asia), but several months passed, and the very “kitsch” logos began to appear on the catwalks - remember the Louis Vuitton bags with monogram or a Gucci T-shirt from the Resort-2017 show, as if found on the ruins of the Vietnamese market.
Now, despite the appearance of the opposite, all trends are set by consumers, without knowing it themselves
The fashion for logos, which determined the whole decade of zero, is really returning, however, now its consumers do not want to flaunt their wealth, but to show an ironic attitude to labels and expensive brands. At that moment, when fashion, as it seemed to us, reached the state of stylistic nirvana, dangling somewhere between new minimalism and athleisure, new heroes led by Alessandro Michele and Demnaia Gvasalia took the foreground. And the point here is not at all the incompetence of the trend hunters, but the fact that consumer sentiment is changing at an incredible speed today, which translates into a dizzying whirl of trends.
It may seem that trend-casting applied to fashion eliminates the very idea of design as a flight of creative thought, and the designer as a genius of color and cut, dictating to the public what to wear. Until the end of the last century, it was so: we know the example of Cristobal Balenciaga, whose futuristic dresses look relevant in the context of modern fashion, or Rei Kawakubo, who was several decades ahead of the trend in feminism and the right of a woman not to look beautiful in the conventional sense, and Alexander McQueen who became the forerunner of fashion for pants with a very low waist (he could not even think about any trend book with his financial problems). But today the situation has changed dramatically.
Now, despite the appearance of the opposite, all trends are set by consumers, without knowing it themselves. Here, to quote the famous quote by American science fiction writer William Gibson: "The future is here. It’s just not so widespread yet." The task of the trend hunters is to read the codes forming the future trends in time, shift them to an understandable language and transfer them to the brands. The task of brands and designers is to analyze the information received, translate it into a visual language and present it to customers in the form of a new collection. Everything once again boils down to the fact that the fashion industry is a serious business, and large companies simply do not have the right to take risks: they have to give their customers what they want. Rather, the fact that customers unconsciously wanted a couple of years ago, but realized this only now, when they received, as they say, the goods face. No romance.
Photo: Markoo, Aalto, Cyrille Gassiline, Alexander Wang Menswear, MISBHV, Ellery, KM20, OiOi
