WHEN a fashion-conscious friend of mine saw a poster of Uma Thurman decked out in a bright yellow motorcycle jacket and matching trousers for the movie
Kill Bill, she turned to me and hissed: “Damn — that means we’re going to look like bananas all summer.”
Actually, Uma’s vivid yellow outfit never quite caught on — although her sneakers, made by the Japanese brand Asics, did. Movies, like pop music promos, clearly have an impact on fashion trends.
Apart from these obvious sources, though, where do trends come from? Why are the stores full of pink one season, green the next, black the season after that? Why does cowgirl follow flapper; Forties take the place of Seventies? Is it some kind of conspiracy? Do the fashion companies get together in a top secret location every autumn and decide what they are going to foist on us the following year? Not quite — but almost.
“I’m not always entirely sure where trends begin,” admits April Glassborow, senior buyer for international designer collections at Harvey Nichols. “But I think they’re started by the fabric mills.”
Fabric suppliers are among the first links in the fashion chain. One of the most influential events of the year is Première Vision, the fabric trade show held in Paris at the end of September. As many as 800 fabric manufacturers from around the world display their wares to design teams and buyers.
The fabric merchants are armed with formidable marketing skills. They have regular clients, and new wefts and weaves to sell. Occasionally they will be asked to come up with a specific fabric for a designer; but they may let slip details of the product to a rival. Similarly, if an influential designer has picked up on a certain fabric, clients who arrive at the stand later may be tactfully encouraged to follow suit. Technology affects trends, too: the resurgence of tweed was provoked by manufacturing developments that made the fabric lighter, more supple and easier to manipulate.
At the other end of the chain, if retailers tacitly agree to support certain colour or fabric trends, it means heightened customer demand, guaranteed sales and less remaindered stock. But if the secret meeting suggested above does not actually take place, how does the message get passed on?
Meet the “style bureaux”. These little-known organisations provide trend information at every level of the fashion ecosystem, from textile merchants to stores. Pierre-François Le Louët, chief executive officer of the Paris-based bureau de style Nelly Rodi, explains: “If you give the same intelligence to those who sell the clothes, those who design them, those who buy the fabrics and those who supply them, there are enormous economic advantages for the fabric manufacturers, because they know what material will be in demand. Similarly, if the retailers are all stocking violet that season, it inevitably creates a demand for violet, so they sell out their stock.”
Nelly Rodi has offices in Italy and Japan and a network of affiliates worldwide. Its clients include L’Oréal, LVMH, Mango, H&M, Liz Claiborne, Agnès B, Givenchy and a clutch of brands across Asia. There are other, similar agencies such as Promostyl, Peclers and Carlin International. But Nelly Rodi, Le Louët’s mother — who remains chairman of the company — was one of the pioneers of trend counselling in Europe. Having handled communications for the designer Courrèges in the early 1970s, she set up her own agency in 1985. Today her company has a team of trend-trackers who jet around the world monitoring youth tribes and fashion innovations.
Nelly Rodi’s most celebrated products are its “trend books”: hefty tomes that resemble deluxe scrapbooks. Filled with photographs, illustrations and fabric swatches, they round up the agency’s predictions of forthcoming trends and act as inspirational tools — or prompts — for designers. Each book costs around £1,000. Retailers and the beauty industry are the biggest buyers. Le Louët says: “The luxury brands don’t buy them often because they see themselves as trendsetters. But I know that photocopies can be found in many designers’ studios.”
With fashion in constant flux, there is a strong argument for producing a trend book that can be updated every day. An online service called the Worth Global Style Network (WGSN) does just that. Created in 1998 by the brothers Julian and Marc Worth, WGSN is the Bloomberg of the fashion industry. Based in London, it has more than 150 staff and outposts in every major capital. As well as daily fashion industry news, it delivers thousands of photographs of stores, catwalk shows and street life from around the globe. With a click of the mouse, its subscribers can see what fabrics were on show at Première Vision the previous morning, or what teenagers on the streets of Shanghai are wearing today. “In this industry, speed is of the essence,” observes Roger Tredre, WGSN’s editor-in-chief.
Perhaps the only people really in touch with the latest trends are those who create them — on the streets. Young consumers are more iconoclastic and inventive than any designer. That’s why the industry needs cool-hunters — undercover agents who can go out into cities, blend in and report back.
MTV’s cool-hunter, Claudine Ben-Zenou, presumably qualifies as one of the coolest people on the planet. Based in Chicago, she mixes with rappers, graffiti artists and Mexican gang members to get a line on youth trends for the television channel. She turns out to be a friendly, discreetly stylish woman in her mid-twenties.
“I’ve always been immersed in subcultures and youth trends,” she says. “But while I found all this fascinating, I didn’t have a clue that I could put it to any practical use.”
At the age of 19 she got a job at a small marketing agency in East London. “The agency specialised in youth marketing, and as I got more involved I realised that I had inside knowledge and connections that could be very useful,” she recounts. “Collaborations between mainstream brands such as Nike and adidas and underground designers are common today but we were among the pioneers.”
Since that first job, Ben-Zenou has acted as a consultant for global brands such as Levi’s, Casio G-Shock, Pepsi and even Disney, providing them with the inside track on street culture. Brands that try to target opinion-formers without doing their homework often find themselves exposed to ridicule, she says. “Graffiti is a good example. I hear all the time about brands that have plucked some random kid off the street. If you’re using somebody who is not a respected artist, the result may not be obvious to you but it’s extremely obvious to people within the scene.”
But isn’t there an age limit for being a cool-hunter? What if, one day, Ben-Zenou wakes up to find that she can no longer relate to icons of hip? She says: “Attitudes to age are changing. And let’s face it, I’ve got 200 pairs of trainers. I can’t see myself suddenly giving up everything I love and dressing in beige anoraks.”
- Extracted from the book Fashion Brands: Branding Style From Armani to Zara (published tomorrow by Kogan Page, £18.99) by Mark Tungate.
