The Business of Trend

I have started an MA in Fashion and Lifestyle Promotion.  Today we had a little introductory session where we all spoke about ourselves.  Name, age, how we got to be on the course, what was the best thing that we encountered on the way, likes/dislikes, who we admire etc.

During this the head of Fashion Design at the university discussed how she loved her job, she loved trend, it didn't feel like work...but that trend itself is like a product.  A product that she doesn't particularly like because if everyone of us brought into it we'd all look the same.  However, what it comes down to is that whether you're a designer or a promoter you are trying to influence people to buy into the trends that you have acknowledged.

Trend is a funny thing.  Designers can get inspiration from anywhere...history, culture, or a cupcake they see in a bakery or trend forecasters.  Trend forecasters scour the land (the whole world!) looking at 'cool' things: a street, a shop, an artist, a subculture that has its own trend within society.  Then they sit back and plan what will happen next.  In the next 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 100 years.  I love it.  And hate it.

Trend is like marmite.  I sit here in my tapered trousers (the shape of the season don't you know!) and I wonder why I chose these.  I didn't acknowledge they were in trend...I hadn't gazed at them in magazines, I hadn't spotted them on catwalks.  I hadn't planned to purchase that particular style, I'd just gone into the shop and there they were but then subconsciously I might have planned to purchase them.  After all, the designers for that shop had planned it.  They'd researched, developed, seen them on celebrities and cool people at catwalk shows and filtered trend down for the high street where it has been successfully sold to me.

The business of trend is frustrating.  Frustating and wonderful.  It's rather amusing to think how it all comes about.  Especially now, in the last throws of fashion week season with Paris Fashion Week in full swing.  I wonder what makes people plan certain items to purchase and what makes others, like me, do it off the cuff with subconscious considerations.  After all, Oscar Wilde said "fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months" yet so many people have been dying for autumn to arrive so they can grab their shearling coats, boots, everything...