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I find this area fascinating, so I thought I'd post this article, although not overly informative.
Roaming the World, Detecting Fashion
Roaming the World, Detecting Fashion
LINDA DeFRANCO recalls a
meeting five years ago where her boss, the head of trend forecasting at
Cotton Inc., came back from a research trip with some interesting
photographs. While strolling the streets of Stockholm, she had seen
teenagers wearing their jeans rolled up a few inches to make them
tighter around the legs.
Ms. DeFranco, a fashion trend forecaster at the time and now
associate director of product trend analysis, said she and her
colleagues predicted a coming trend ? skinny jeans ? and relayed that
to their retail clients. ?At the time a lot of ?80s fashion was coming
back into style, and this look clearly fit with that,? she said. The
team?s hunch was right ? by 2006, skinny jeans were all the rage.
The industry has used trend forecasts for 40 years, but the
forecaster?s role has changed substantially from the late ?60s and
early ?70s. Then, forecasters were simply trend-spotters, taking photos
and reporting on what people were wearing in clubs and on the streets
of Europe, said David Wolfe, who did that himself in London in the late
?60s.
?European ready-to-wear styles were becoming interesting to American
designers and retailers, and there was a hunger for this kind of
information,? he said. ?We were like foreign correspondents, only for
fashion.?
Mr. Wolfe now directs 20 trend forecasters at the Donegar Group in
Manhattan, which provides global market trend analysis to the fashion
industry.
Today, fashion forecasting is focused as much on market analysis as
on spotting street trends. Forecasters commonly work for trend analysis
firms like the Donegar Group, WGSN and Stylesight, or retailers like
Macy?s and J. C. Penney.
Entry-level trend forecasters travel the world with cameras and
laptops, photographing people, food, furniture, public art and anything
else that might influence fashion and design. They send their photos
and notes via e-mail to forecasting teams back home who put the
information into context, considering things like the political and
economic climate and trends in music, food and interior design.
?You become a translator, looking at cultural signposts and
connecting things that appear to be disparate, but aren?t,? said Helen
Job, who teaches trend-spotting at Parsons the New School for Design and is head of East Coast content for WGSN, both in New York.
Ms. Job recently traveled with another forecaster to Austin, Tex.,
for the South by Southwest music and media festival. ?We took about
4,000 photos of what people were wearing, but we also looked at what
bands seemed to be influential in terms of fashion, what companies were
sponsoring them and at the graphics on fliers and CD sleeves,? she
said.
Forecasters provide reports about trends expected to materialize a
year or two in the future within narrow market segments, like footwear,
accessories, activewear or men?s underwear. Reports include information
about fabrics, color, silhouettes and styling.
About 1,000 to 1,500 people work as fashion trend forecasters,
according to Evelyn Brannon, author of ?Fashion Forecasting?
(Fairchild), and others in the industry. That number is likely to grow
with demand for trend information, driven by competition in the fashion
industry.
?Competition is tremendous, so there is a lot of pressure to get
the first stage of product development right ? color, fabric, styling
concepts,? said Mark Messura, an executive vice president at Cotton
Inc., a trade group for the cotton industry that provides trend
forecasts to retailers and manufacturers.
Although the profession is small, there is no shortage of
candidates. ?This is a dream job,? Ms. DeFranco said. ?Especially if
you love to travel, love fashion and are creative.?
Carly Beumel, a trend forecaster for the retailer Anthropologie and adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology
in New York, says trend forecasting is not easy to break into, but can
be glamorous and exciting. ?I get to go to garment factories in Asia,
the Grand Bazaar in Turkey and to India to do fabric research on
cottons and silks,? she said.
THE starting salary for a trend forecaster is generally in the low
to mid-$20,000s, said Frank Bober, chief executive of Stylesight in New
York, which has more than 60 trend reporters and forecasters. For
senior management it can reach the low to middle six figures, he said.
Those who hire forecasters say that much of the skill required for
the job is intuitive, but many forecasters come from a fashion or
design background and have degrees from institutions specializing in
those fields.
Karolyn Wangstad, vice president for trend merchandising at J. C.
Penney, says business acumen is also essential. She looks for a
background in merchandising, product development or entrepreneurship.
Perhaps most important, said Mr. Wolfe of the Donegar Group, is
broad intellectual curiosity. ?A red flag for me when I?m hiring is
someone who says ?my whole life is fashion.? You have to be interested
in much more than fashion,? he said. ?You have to understand the world
if you are going to understand what people want to wear.?
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