So they say we`re wearing plaid, driving brighter color cars, buying soaps instead of sofas and favoring bite-size candy bars.
But who is responsible for these trends that shape our everyday lives? Do some grand pooh-bahs of influence make up these dictates as we go along? Just who is calling the shots?
Some claim the ball starts rolling with European apparel designers;
others say textile mills, paint manufacturers, marketing departments or the media.
Others say consumers calls the shots.
Ed Nardoza, editor of Women`s Wear Daily, a New York-based trade publication for the apparel industry, says ”no designer can dictate to the consumer no matter who he is. Consumers look to fashion publications to tell them what`s new, but they won`t buy a look because we said so. Or a designer said so,” he says.
Still, we can`t buy what isn`t there. And what is there is what manufacturers decide we haven`t bought in a while. It`s a cyclical method of supply and demand-a scheme in which what you bought last season helps to determine what manufacturers will try to sell you the next.
If they`ve been selling you ”short, black and tight” for the last three seasons, says Steven Stolman, a New York-based designer, this year they`ll sell you crayon-colored tones. And next year, it may be stripes. ”The idea is to give the customer something she doesn`t already have in her closet.” says Stolman.
50,000 influences
While you can trace the Chanel bag to Coco Chanel, the Mies van der Rohe chair to Mies van der Rohe and the DeLorean car to John De Lorean, style trends without famous names attached have less traceable roots.
”A trend is a cultural direction. It happens with about 50,000 things that catapult it into being. It cannot be created,” says Faith Popcorn, author of ”The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life” (Doubleday, $22.50) and chairwoman of BrainReserve, a marketing and consultant firm in New York.
How trends are identified is a meticulous process. As a consultant to a number of Fortune 500 companies including American Express, Coca-Cola USA, and Philip Morris International, Popcorn employs thousands of people to interview consumers, go to movies, watch TV and brainstorm. Using all this information as clues, she then projects what trends will emerge in the next decade.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Would you believe Ronald Reagan, Earth Day and the Olympics have influenced today`s and even tomorrow`s color trends?
So says Patricia Verlodt, president of the Arlington, Va.-based Color Marketing Group, a consortium of 1,200 manufacturers from industries as varied as cars to silk flowers. They meet twice a year to chat about movies, discuss politics, sift through current events and consider the arts-all in an effort to nail down color trends for the years ahead.
”We try to determine what is happening down the road and what will have an influence on color,” explains Verlodt, noting that that can include anything and everything from popular politicians and popular movies to art exhibits with a mass appeal.
For instance, Verlodt links the recent Southwestern-inspired pastel craze to the Georgia O`Keeffe exhibit that traversed the country in the mid to late 1980s..
She says men got the OK to start wearing brown suits again from then-President Ronald Reagan who dared to don the color and from President George Bush who has continued the ”trend.”
And Verlodt believes Americans` heightened environmental consciousness is inspiring a whole new slew of trendy colors. Earthtones (it makes sense) are replacing gray as the neutral of choice. Green (but make it dark green, not the avocado or celery green of the `70s) is coming on strong, as are floral colors like rose red and geranium pink.
What`s next-and where did it come from?
Red, red and more red-care of Spain, says Verlodt. With the summer Olympic games in Barcelona, Expo `92 in Seville and the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus` landing in America, some sort Spanish influence is a good bet.
Thou shall not tell us …
These days, though, good bets aren`t all that easy to come by.
”It used to be a product-driven business where the designer forced the retailer to take it, and in turn he forced the consumer to take it,” says Nardoza of WWD. ”But five to six years ago there was a change, a complete flip-flop.” Women wouldn`t buy into the micro-mini look.
Although today`s consumers no longer buy into fashion ”commandments”
(WWD no longer publishes ”What`s In and What`s Out”), there is still a certain predictability pertictability to the process of developing fashion trends, according to Nardoza.
”Historically, Europe and a handful of key designers-today it`s Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, Vivienne Westwood, Claude Montana, Jean-Paul Gaultier- have been the inspiration. But now there is a lot more cross-pollination of street style.”
No matter who designs the clothes, the fundamentals of how they are made is the same, and that is where some of the coincidence of ”sameness” sets in, says Nardoza.
”Designers go to the same fabric mills,” says Nardoza, explaining why there was a plaid overload last fall.
If the shoe fits
There`s little mystery about what`s going to be hot in footwear. Shoe styles are closely connected to apparel.
”Nobody knew what to do in terms of long or short (skirts), so they did both. And if skirts are short, they have high heels and if they are long, they need flats,” says Dick Silverman, editor of Footwear News, a New York-based trade publication.
For footwear manufacturers, schizophrenic hemlines became an easy trend to follow: they made both flats and heels.
Similar to the apparel industry, the European influence is felt in footwear, as well, according to Silverman. The shoe shows in Milan, Florence and Dusseldorf (which happen more than a year in advance of when the American consumer will get to buy the shoes) certainly inspire American designers.
One for the road
Why are today`s cars rounded and shapely and why is color hot?
Once again, fashion has something to do with it.
”(Car) colors are dictated by fashion,” explains Tom Dukes, an engineer and consultant with J.D. Power and Associates, Agoura Hills, Calif., a marketing information and forecasting company for the automobile industry.
”We had the Southwestern colors and now black is no longer the case. Manufacturers maintain color velocity charts to see how long a certain color stays on a (car dealer`s) lot.”
The latest development in automobile paint technology, according to Dukes: the addition of mica chips (small pieces of metal) in paint to create deep, metallic, lustered colors.
These new pearlescent, highly reflective colors go hand-in-hand with the soft, rounded lines of today`s cars-a design trend started by the Ford Taurus Sable and expected to last the industry average of seven years, according to Dukes.
Specific vehicles become trendy, Dukes says, because they deserve to be. The Jeep and its follow-ups, the Wagoneer and the Grand Cherokee, became
”cult vehicles” because of their ”durability, reliability” and relatively low price tags, he says.
”(The Jeep) is such a universal vehicle with roots that go back 50 years,” Dukes says. ”It was the all-purpose vehicle in the military, and as it got older, it became more sophisticated. It moved into civilian life.”
According to Dukes, the trend for urbanites to own a Jeep began in the mid-`
80s and it was not the result of an advertising blitz. It became popular, he says, because it is ”tough, rugged and easy to fix.” More and more people discovered the Jeep made sense for any lifestyle, not just ranchers and country folk, says Duke. ”The Jeep did more for its image by itself than any crafted marketing strategy ever could.”
Home economics
Pure economics is behind many of the trends in home decoration:
Furniture, by and large, is expensive. People don`t have money right now.
”People can`t afford a new sofa so they get an old chair done in white denim slipcovers,” says Ed Figlewicz, product designer and sales manager for Mottura, a San Francisco-based design company specializing in furniture, home and personal accessories. What`s important in home style today, Figlewicz says, is ”the reintroduction of classics, nothing trendy, but what is timeless. The consumer wants well-designed necessities.”
Read the word ”trend” in slipcovers, the classics and well-designed necessities.
At the movies
Although Hollywood often is blamed for manufacturing trends, those connected to the world of with the industry maintain movies only accelerate trends-from hairstyles to fashion to interior designs-but not create them.
”Film popularizes fashion trends, but they don`t start on screen,” says Mike Silverman, publisher of the Los Angeles-based entertainment trade publication Daily Variety. ”Flashdance,” for instance, didn`t start the trend of workout wear as street clothes, it augmented it. And the movie,
”House Party” didn`t start teenagers getting flat-top haircuts, it only popularized it, says Silverman.
What movies are made at a certain period in time is no whim or accident, though. The process from development to distribution is usually 18 months and involves hundreds of people, says Silverman.
The current trend in films is to capitalize on television shows that were hits when the Baby Boomers were young. Thus, the ”Addams Family,” Silverman says, and look for a feature film about Flipper.
Whether you pay the full admission price to see a movie about Flipper or wait until it`s on video, you can only see the films studios have selected for distribution to theaters or video stores. Consumers` habits can only influence decisions, but they do not control the entertainment industry or any industry. We`re only part of the equation.
Several designers and manufacturers can forge a trend by simultaneously rushing to market with plaid coats, pearlescent cars or spicy frozen food. But the consumer delivers the verdict on whether a trend will catch on or fall flat on its face.
