Anatomy of a Trend

By Henrik Vejlgaard

Why do millions of people end up wearing the same style of clothing?
What makes people change their tastes in food, music, and cars?

It's because of trends - the powerful process of change that affects every industry across the globe.

Drawing on his groundbreaking research, trend sociologist Henrik Vejlgaard unearths essential clues about how trends emerge and go mainstream and examines the influential individuals who make this happen.

Throughout are real-life stories of both famous and anonymous movers and shakers who have had worldwide influence in changing our styles of living, including business leaders, designers, and artists, whole also conveying the fascinating development of little-known trends that perfectly illustrate the trend's life cyckle. Anatomy of a Trend explores every level of this remarkable process - making it easy for you to benefit from the powerful social dynamic that causes trends to take off and spread.

Vejlgaard delivers the tools and knowledge you need to capitalize on every stage of the trend process. As you gain insigt into this aspect of human behavior you will better understand trends and how they affect society, and ultimately learn how you can predict future needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Confetti Publishing
• Release date: Mar 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476380513

Henrik Vejlgaard

Henrik Vejlgaard, MA, MSc, is the author of Anatomy of a Trend (published by Confetti Publishing) and The Lifestyle Puzzle (published by Prometheus Books).

Book preview

Copyright © 2008 by Henrik Vejlgaard. All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The Diamond-Shaped Trend Model is protected by U.S. and international copyright. The model can be used under license for commercial purposes. Worldwide rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-939235-37-4

ISBN-10: 1-939235-37-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vejlgaard, Henrik.

Anatomy of a trend / by Henrik Vejlgaard.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-07-148870-7 (alk. paper)

1. Popular culture. 2. Social change. 3. Style (Philosophy)

4. Fads. I. Title.

To the memory of my father

Contents

INTRODUCTION

FROM INTUITION TO KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER 1

AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY

Investigating the Trend Process

CHAPTER 2

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

Trend Creators and Trendsetters

CHAPTER 3

WHAT’S THE MOTIVE?

Psychology at Work

CHAPTER 4

THE SETTING

Where Worldwide Trends Begin

CHAPTER 5

THE PLOT THICKENS

Dissecting Real-Life Trends

CHAPTER 6

TOWARDS THE CLIMAX

Identifying the Final Clues

CHAPTER 7

ANTICLIMAX

Ups and Downs for Businesses

EPILOGUE

A Continuing Story:

The Future of Trends

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SOURCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

Introduction

From Intuition to Knowledge

Many people have been led to believe that trends are about intuition. This is because the majority of the people who work with trends find it difficult to explain why something will happen the way they say it will. The explanation often boils down to because I think so. Some people do seem to be able to predict what will happen based on their own intuition. Unfortunately, there are too many cases in which people’s intuition has obviously been mistaken for us to accept the intuitive method. Furthermore, intuition is a skill that can’t be learned by the rest of us. So because intuition is so highly uncertain, we need other methods if we want to understand trends. This book represents an alternative analytical method based on trend sociology.

Anatomy of a Trend analyzes a variety of trends, all of which have eventually become a part of mainstream society. This book isn’t an update on new and emerging trends. Instead, it reveals the patterns behind trends and what we can learn by examining trends systematically. Such study is possible because there are predictable patterns in every trend. Most of the trends discussed in this book go back several decades. There are two reasons for this. First, using older examples enables us to document that some of the patterns evolved over a long period of time and that they are well established and unlikely to change any time soon. And second, as we will see in the following chapters, trends take a while to emerge and evolve, which means that some time has to pass before we can finally conclude that what we are dealing with actually was or is a trend.

This book demonstrates that some patterns occur repeatedly whenever a new trend emerges. Although the world is changing all the time and this flux may eventually affect the patterns behind the trend process, these patterns are deeply rooted in human behavior, which also tends to follow fairly predictable patterns. Unless society is dramatically transformed and becomes radically different from the way it is now, the patterns that have emerged in the decades leading up to the twenty-first century are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. If such a transformation does happen, it is likely that the trend process will change—along with everything else.

Each of this book’s seven chapters ends with a summary of certain characteristics that can be used to understand emerging trends. By investigating the people who have started trends in the past, where trends frequently start, how trends emerge and grow, and why trends happen, we can define some rules for spotting trends.

The purpose of Anatomy of a Trend is to give you tools that will help you spot emerging trends and/or evaluate critically and independently something that is presented as a new trend. After reading the book, you will be able to judge for yourself whether the latest new and exciting trend is a real trend or just a fad.

Trends are a unique and intriguing process of change, and they affect most of us. By following the evidence that is scattered throughout this book, you can get to know the intricacies of the remarkable social dynamic that causes trends to spread. We all fit into the trend process and play a part when style and taste are changing, but some may find that they play a bigger part than they think.

In 1983, chefs were not using cranberries, an original American fruit, in salads and other dishes. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, cranberries were used in food all over the world. Who made that happen?

Also in the early 1980s, hardly anyone had heard of rap music. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had grown into a major music genre that could be heard all over the world, in many languages. What happened during that 25-year time period?

In 1997, only people whose style was considered conservative were wearing trench coats. Ten years later, trench coats had become fashionable in large cities all over the world. Where did this revival of the trench coat begin?

At the start of the twenty-first century, car manufacturers were introducing cars with a retro style, inspired by car models from past decades. When did the interest in retro style start?

These questions reflect one of the mysteries of modern culture: how changes in style and taste come about. At a certain point, we can see that there have been changes, but how these changes come about is often perceived as an unexplainable phenomenon. It is, of course, the unexplored gray area of trends that we are dealing with.

With newspapers, magazines, and just about every other medium using the word trend on a regular basis, we are all talking about trends more and more—in both our private and our professional conversations. But for something that has become so popular in our language, we seem to know very little about what a trend is, how to define it, and how it affects us as individuals, as businesses, and as a society.

Most people can indicate what the word is referring to—something new or hot. Often people will also point out that a trend is something airy or mysterious, or something that is completely unpredictable. However, this is, in fact, not the case.

When people talk about trends, most of them want to know certain information: What is the latest thing? What is hot or cool? What is the new style? What is the new trend in, for instance, home furnishings? Is the new style glamorous or minimalist? This book will not answer these questions. Instead, its purpose is to share the story of a trend and ultimately enable you to find the answers to these or similar questions.

By using the conclusions in this book, you will learn how to identify emerging trends, how to understand them, and how to make predictions concerning the course of a trend.

If a trend is indeed like a story, then this book is like a detective story; it will lead us through a plot where questions will be asked— and answered. Though many people are familiar with the meaning of the word, what is actually going on as the trend progresses is still something of a riddle to most people. With good reason: the progress of a trend is one of the unsolved mysteries of present-day social life. What is known is that the plot starts with one or more persons who create something new, in one way or another. The main plot, however, revolves around quite a varied group of people, the trendsetters. They are the central characters in this story. Without the trendsetters, there would be no climax and no conclusion to the story.

We know that the trendsetters set off the action and affect all the other characters in the story, but the intricate relations by which they make this happen have not been told before. Anatomy of a Trend will delve into a lot of evidence of their influence. In keeping with the metaphor of the detective story, we will visit real settings and meet real people who have made a huge difference in our styles of living. This is very much a real-life detective story, with concrete answers to who, where, when—and why. With the full body of evidence, we will be able to reveal the anatomy of not just one trend, but all trends.

THE EVOLUTION OF A WORD

To truly understand this story of a trend, it’s meaningful to know the backstory—the word’s history. The word trend and the concept it describes are certainly not new. But for much of the twentieth century, the word was used only in very limited circles, mainly among statisticians and economists. In the last third of the twentieth century, it also became common in the fashion industry. And it is mostly via the fashion industry that the word trend and the interest in trends have become part of our everyday life when we talk about design and style. (The terms design and style are often used synonymously, but in this book design refers to individual designed objects, whereas style describes a certain mix of designed objects—for instance, designed objects can be mixed into a romantic style or a minimalist style.)

Originally trend was an Old English word meaning to turn. This is probably why the word became popular among statisticians and economists. In statistics, trend means the direction of a curve. Often a statistician will use the word trend when the direction of a curve is not all that evident. For instance, if there is only a slight change in the curve, a careful statistician will talk of a positive or negative trend in the curve instead of saying that the curve is going up or going down (either direction can be positive or negative, depending on what the curve is representing).

When a statistician speaks of a trend, there is very little doubt that we are dealing with factual data. For instance, take the book It’s Getting Better All the Time, where Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon present the 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, using official statistics to document the many changes that have taken place in the United States in the twentieth century. The authors provide 21 timelines in areas ranging from health to transportation to wealth to document what they see as improvements in all areas over long periods of time. Here are some of the statistics mentioned in It’s Getting Better All the Time:

In 1900, the average workweek in the United States (and in many other countries) was 60 hours. People often worked on Saturdays or worked five 12-hour days. By 1909, the average workweek had dropped to 51 hours, and by 1950, it was about 40 hours. The 40-hour workweek is still pretty much the standard for people who work full-time.

As a result, workers have more leisure time today. The authors quote the work done by sociologist John Robinson, who has discovered that the average American gained about five extra hours of free time a week during the 20-year period from 1965 to 1985. Many factors contributed to this pattern, such as the number of vacation days, which more than doubled between 1960 and 2000 in the United States.

To a historian, these statistics are meaningful trends, but to someone in the fashion industry or a trend sociologist, they are not trends at all. They are nothing more than statistical documentation of historical changes. To a trend sociologist, a trend is not something that has happened, but rather a prediction of something that is going to happen in a certain way—specifically, something that will be accepted by the average person. Someone who is working with or interested in design and style will also use the word trend to focus on the very first signs of change, such as a sudden interest in ornamentation on women’s clothing or consumers being attracted to a new type of car.

Clearly, a trend means different things to different people. But many people associate the word trend with design and style. This makes sense because one of the first magazine uses of the word dates back to 1936 when the Design and Industries Association in England published a magazine with the name Trend that featured articles about new products and new design.

People who are interested in or who work with trends can use the word in different ways. In popular magazines, we see headlines like New Furniture Trends. In this case, trend means product news. Someone who is working in design can talk about the trend in the new car collections from the big car manufacturers. This will be a reflection on the product development that is going on in the car industry, so in this case trend will mean product development. Finally, a trend sociologist will talk about a trend moving from the trendsetters to mainstream. In this case, trend refers to a process of change.

Interestingly enough, these three uses of the word are interconnected. You can say that a trend is a process of change that (sometimes) comes about because of product development that (sometimes) results in new products. Which definition you use depends upon which portion of this flow you are focusing on.

Journalists, for example, focus on the first definition, product news, because news is what they write about. Time magazine, for instance, has featured a Trends column, defined as a sampler of the latest in fashion, cocktails, technology and travel. This is also the understanding of the word that most consumers have.

The second definition, product development, is used in many industries, from fashion to book publishing. It refers to the product development that goes on in the trendsetting companies. These companies create something new, and many other companies then copy these new products or get inspiration from them.

The third definition refers to a process of change that begins with trendsetters and moves into the mainstream; eventually this change may even fall out of favor. With this usage, if something is a trend, we are very early in this process—we are focusing on the very first sign (or signs) of change.

The focus of this book is on this third definition and how this process takes place—in other words, the story of the trend. Trendsetters play a crucial role in this process, as we’ll discover as we delve into the story. The term trendsetter, obviously derived from the word trend, entered the language much later—in the first half of the 1960s. Both historically and today, the word trendsetter is mostly used in relation to design and style.

But trends are not limited to design and style; they also affect what we eat and drink, what we like to read, the movies we want to watch, and the other areas where we use the word taste to describe what we like. For instance, we say My taste in food (not My style in food). Therefore this detective story follows changes in both style and taste, as well as the behavior surrounding style and taste. It can, for instance, be about what we eat (such as Mexican food), or it can be about where, how, and when we eat it (e.g., in the form of takeout). But in order not to be too repetitive, most of the time I will refer only to style, even though this will often mean style and taste.

CHANGES IN STYLE AND TASTE

Style and taste really undergo two types of changes; one of these is short term, while the other is long term. In the case of the style associated with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we have an example of both. Jacqueline Kennedy, the former U.S. First Lady, was a style icon for most of her adult life, not just in the United States, but throughout a large part of the world. When Jacqueline Kennedy was First Lady in the early 1960s, her clothing style was the epitome of 1960s style. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jackie Kennedy style again became popular, but only among a very small group of people and only for a very short time. The comeback of the Jackie Kennedy style is a typical example of a short-term fashion fad.

The evolution of this particular short-term fashion fad began in February 2001 when the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston announced that on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Jacqueline Kennedy’s emergence as America’s First Lady, in order to explore her enduring global influence on style, there would be a special exhibition of the original clothing and accessories she wore at state events in the United States and abroad, all of which had been donated to the library after her death in 1994. The exhibition opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and went on to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2001 and included a book on her style.

Behind the scenes, the Jackie Kennedy style was promoted to the fashion industry as the next big thing by Textile View magazine, one of the world’s leading trade magazines for the fashion industry. So, just what effect did this show have on the world of fashion? Well, the style attracted the interest of some people in the fashion world, but it never really caught on in any lasting way. It was quickly forgotten. The following is a chronology of what happened behind the scenes:

In the autumn 2001 edition of Textile View magazine, there was a detailed article about the Jackie Kennedy style.

In the autumn of 2002, the Louis Vuitton collection for spring/summer 2003 was presented to the press and the store buyers on the catwalk in Paris. The fashions were clearly inspired by Jackie Kennedy’s style.

In autumn 2002, Textile View again featured an article about the modern interpretation of the Kennedy style for autumn/ winter 2003/2004.

In the autumn of 2002 the exhibition traveled to Paris, where it was shown at the Musée de la Mode, also with long lines.

In the spring of 2003, the first Louis Vuitton collection inspired by the Jackie Kennedy style went on sale to the public.

In the spring of 2003, Louis Vuitton presented its autumn and winter collection for 2003/2004 to the press and store buyers. Once more the understated early-1960s style was one of the themes of the collection.

In the spring of 2003, Textile View suggested themes for its designer readers with regard to the spring/summer 2004 season. This time the focus was on summer clothing in the Kennedy style.

In the autumn of 2003, several trendy fashion magazines had headlines like Watch Out for 1960s Style with references to the Louis Vuitton collection. The collection that had been presented in spring 2003 was then for sale in the Louis Vuitton stores.

In some of the spring/summer collections for 2004 presented at fashion fairs in the autumn of 2003, other designers had also been inspired by the Jackie Kennedy style.

That was it. The following season there was no hint of Jackie Kennedy at the fashion houses or the companies that copy them. Suddenly the Jackie Kennedy style was over.

The comeback of the Jackie Kennedy style was a typical seasonal fashion fad that had a short time span and no long-lasting influence on fashion history (though not typical of fads, this particular fad can be said—together with many other different seasonal fashion fads—to be a variation on the overall nostalgia theme that was prevalent at the time). Each season there may be 5 or 10, or even more, seasonal fashion fads like the comeback of the Jackie Kennedy style that typically get a lot of sudden coverage in the fashion magazines. However, these seasonal fashion fads created by a designer or a brand quickly become outdated when they have been copied by other fashion designers and when they have been written about in the fashion magazines for one or