“There’s little spookier than when you think you’re making a bold, original fashion decision only to see mannequins dressed exactly like you in store windows and realising you’re actually an unwitting data point in the zeitgeist.
Millennials have something new to moan about and it’s much worse than the rising cost of living or the seemingly inevitable heat death of the planet – the youth have adopted Y2K and noughties fashion as their latest ‘vintage’ trend.
This burgeoning craze is not only the ghost of fashion crimes past (low-rise pants are a mistake), but a cruel reminder of the unceasing passage of time – the noughties were now 20 years ago making this resurgence a neat example of the 20-year rule, one of the most well-known maxims of trend forecasting.
Trends can be a tricky thing to predict most of the time. They’re much easier to spot in hindsight or at their peak than to pick out in advance. Who decides what’s trendy and when? And can examining trends as a phenomenon tell us something more significant than where we should be parting our hair right now? What exactly is a trend, even?
“A seemingly simple but
