The
End of Trend
Trend forecasting companies have controlled the fashion industry for the past fifty years, but will they stay relevant in the age of social media? By Meredith Welborn
Photo courtesy of Burnett New York/Dan Lecca Photography
M
What you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns ... And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. - Miranda Priestly to her assistant Andy in the 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada.
eryl Streep’s portrayal of Miranda Priestly, a character based on the tyrannical but respected American Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour, shed light on a truth about how the fashion industry dictates style. For years, powerful people like the editor of Vogue have defined what is “trending” in fashion. But that is changing as individuals gain power through social media. “The whole world of trend forecasting is changing,” said Courtney Maum, a former forecaster and author of the 2017 novel “Touch,” about a trend forecaster. According to Debra Johnston Cobb and Kate Scully, authors of “Color Forecasting for Fashion,” trend forecasting began in the 1950s. Rather than predicting trends, however, forecasting companies would look back at the previous season’s work and point to what they
12 • SMU LOOK
saw as recurring themes on the runways. By the 1970s, forecasting had expanded significantly. Companies were now forecasting trends up to eight months in advance, in essence making decisions about colors, skirt lengths and heel heights. “Fashion forecasting is the practice of predicting upcoming trends based on past and present style-related information, the interpretation and analysis of the motivation behind a trend and an explanation of why the prediction is likely to occur,” said designer and Southern Methodist University fashion media professor Elif Kavakci. “Fashion forecasters communicate the information they gather to designers, retailers, product developers, manufacturers and business professionals.” Rather than letting artisans and designers make their own creative decisions, these
powerful groups began deciding what’s in and what’s out, becoming a powerful force in the fashion industry. A trend, explains SMU fashion media professor Dr. Ethan Lascity, “is all really sort of a social construct: Who is making these decisions? Who are we following?” Today, Pantone and World Global Style Network are among the premier trend forecasting companies making those decisions. WGSN alone has upwards of 70,000 designers and merchandisers who subscribe to its daily and annual reports. These reports tell designers, for instance, millennial pink is the new it-color or insist merchandisers stop spending money on skinny jeans because that trend is now history. Miranda Priestly may have been a fictional character, but her observation is very real: Consumers nowadays rarely have control over what they like and don’t like.
