A Spring Summer 2010 trend feature from online retailer Asos.com.
I’d like to do a Fashion 101 post about fashion trends and forecasting, since it’s an area that I work in, and find quite fascinating. In fact, I am going to write two posts on fashion trends, the first one will focus on how trends come about, and the second one about how magazines present trends. I feel bad for being so mean to the magazines, and revealing their dirty tricks, but in this day of absolute transparency (thanks to the internet), I think its only fair that the readers know how things work. But first, let’s talk about where fashion trends come from.
One of the questions I often get asked is “Why do designers have the same ideas at the same time?” and by answering this, I am sort of answering the question “Where do trends come from?”
A Spring Summer 2010 trend feature from luxury online retailer Net-A-Porter.com.
Designers don’t all have the same ideas at the same time, as we saw on the
Fall Winter 2010 catwalks, not everyone was doing the same thing. But there were certainly a few things that repeated: there were a lot more curvy, feminine silhouettes, lots of designers were reviving 90’s minimalism, and there was a lot of sheepskin. So how does this happen? Do they all have a chat and decide what they are going to do? No, in fact its the opposite, designers are very secretive about what they do, until after their catwalk show. They have the same ideas at the same time
because they are exposed to similar influences and they are looking for inspiration at the same time.
A Spring Summer 2010 trend feature from Topshop.com.
The fashion industry is small, and whether you are living in Paris, London, or New York, you are going to be exposed to similar inspirational influences as other designers. Firstly, everyone starts their research process after the shows, so in March while most of us were digesting the Fall Winter shows and wondering what we were going to buy come September when the collections were arriving in store, designers are off researching their Spring Summer 2011 collections. They will be looking at similar things, like art exhibitions, new creative work (design, architecture, fine art), new bands or other performance artists, interesting films, new books that have come out (and I don’t mean paperbacks, I mean visual books with creative work, like retrospective books or photography books), etc… Some designers will go off to foreign countries to get inspired, but they may have also been inspired by their last holiday, which was probably to some trendy holiday hotspot that many other designers went to as well. Everyone is exposed to similar ideas, and because designers have often been trained in the same ways, they just tend to move in the same directions. They “feel” things at the same time.
The images from the book Vacant inspired collections by Luella (punk styling), Sonia Rykiel (studs on shoes and knitwear), and Emanuel Ungaro (punk-style clothing.)
I hope this isn’t to vague, but I can give some examples. When I was in Paris in 2000, a book called
Vacant: A Diary of the Punk Years 1976-1979 came out. It was full of photos from the punk years, and I remember quite a lot of designers bought it. At the time, studs weren’t that commonplace in fashion (not like today) but there were quite a few designers who were influenced by this book. At
Sonia Rykiel, we added these fantastic studded shoes to our collection, inspired by the book. We also stuck studs to our knitwear. At
Emanuel Ungaro, they featured punk and rockabilly looks on their catwalk, and blasted
Billy Idol during the show. Luella named her collection “Daddy, who were The Clash.” So that punk trend was probably kicked started by the fact that everyone bought that same book.
The next step would be for the magazines to pick up on the “punk” inspiration, and they present it to their readers as the newest trend. I’ll explain more about that part of the process in the next Fashion 101.
Babyshambles and other London indie rock bands inspired Dior Homme.
Was it a coincidence that Sonia Rykiel and Emanuel Ungaro had similar inspirations, when in fact the design teams were friends? No. There is no doubt in my mind that the sharing of ideas between different designers contributes to the fact that there are similarities between collections, even if it is completely unintentional. I remember one season at Sonia Rykiel when we had put a very bright, brash yellow into our collection. we we were worried the the colour was bordering on tacky. Three days before the show, one of our fabric suppliers accidentally delivered a role of fabric to us, which was meant to be going to
Louis Vuitton (whose design team, at the time, were very friendly with the designers over at Sonia Rykiel.) Louis Vuitton’s fabric was in the exact shade of yellow that we had put into our collection. The fabric suppliers begged us to return it immediately and not breathe a word about it, which we did. But we also breathed a huge sigh of relief that we weren’t off the mark with our bizarre yellow, because if Louis Vuitton were doing it, then it was definitely going to be cool.
To the left, Sonia Rykiel, other images, Louis Vuitton. All Spring Summer 2000. The yellow looked a lot more garish in real life, in these photos it looks a lot milder.
It is really interesting to track trends through fashion, because you can usually tie trends to something visually exciting that impacted the designers at the time of their research: The Memoirs of a Geisha film came out before Dior did their spectacular Spring Summer 2007 couture show, which was heavily inspired by traditional Japanese kimonos. Chloe’s 2001 horses collection came out shortly after the publication of a book called Rodeo Girl, which featured photographs of cowgirls. In 2005, Hedi Slimane was inspired by the sleazy indie rock bands of Camden Town, like Pete Dogherty and Babyshambles, for his Dior Homme collections.
The Rodeo Girl book inspired this Chloe collection, with images of horses.
So that’s why I tell people who are interested in getting into trend forecasting to be on the ball about…everything. Especially things that are visually interesting. You never know who or what is going to inspire the next major fashion trend.
Memoirs of a Geisha inspired Christian Dior Haute Couture.
