Every six months or so, someone in fashion declares that a trend is "over." The announcement is made with confidence, usually accompanied by evidence that could support almost any conclusion. Logomania is over. Quiet luxury is over. The dopamine dressing moment has passed. What follows, invariably, is that the trend in question continues for another eighteen months while the people who declared it over move on to declaring the next thing over.

I find this cycle exhausting, and I suspect I am not alone. More usefully, I think it tells us something important about how the industry thinks about trends -- and why that thinking is increasingly out of step with how consumers actually use fashion.

The Trend Industry Is Not About Trends

The machinery that produces trend forecasting -- the consultancies, the trade press, the research firms, the influential editors and buyers -- has a structural incentive to produce novelty. If last season's trend is still relevant this season, there is no need to buy this season's forecast report. If your wardrobe from two years ago still works, there is less pressure to update it.

This is not a conspiracy. It is just incentive structure. But it means that the trend industry is systematically inclined to overstate the pace of change and understate the durability of things that genuinely resonate with consumers.

The data is fairly clear on this: the trends that matter -- the ones that shift what significant numbers of people actually wear, rather than what appears in forecast decks -- tend to run much longer than the coverage cycle suggests. Athleisure as a genuine clothing category lasted well over a decade. Minimalism in its various forms has been a continuous influence since the nineties. The specific manifestations change; the underlying impulse does not.

What Is Actually Happening Right Now

If I try to describe what I am genuinely observing -- in showrooms, on streets in multiple cities, in conversations with buyers and consumers -- the honest summary is something like: a broad preference for quality of construction over novelty of form, combined with a growing comfort with wearing things from multiple eras simultaneously.

This is not a trend in the industry sense. It is more like a general orientation. And it is producing very different looks in different contexts, which is part of why it is hard to name.

In practice, it looks like: more interest in the craft dimension of fashion (how things are made, where, by whom). More patience in shopping. More mixing of price points. More willingness to wear the same good piece repeatedly rather than acquiring new things constantly. These are not aesthetic choices in isolation; they are expressions of a different relationship with consumption.

Three People Who Are Reading This Correctly

Alexandra Park, Head of Consumer Insights, McKinsey Fashion Practice, has been making a case internally that their forecasting methodology needs to change: "We've been very good at identifying what the market is doing in the next six months. We've been much less good at the eighteen-month to three-year picture. That's where the real changes are happening, and those are the changes that actually require brands to act."

Yuki Chen, Creative Director, research withheld by request, points to the data: "We track search behavior and purchase behavior across about forty markets. The gap between what people say they want and what they actually buy has narrowed significantly over the past two years. People are buying closer to their stated preferences. That sounds obvious but it is actually unusual -- there used to be a lot of aspirational purchasing that didn't reflect genuine preference. Less of that now."

And Yuki Mueller, who prefers to speak off the record but gave permission to be quoted anonymously: "The honest truth is that most trend forecasting is reverse-engineered from what is already happening. We observe, we label, we present. The brands that are actually ahead of the market are not buying forecast reports. They are paying very close attention to their own customers."

An Honest Assessment

The trend industry will continue to produce trends, because there is a market for them. Brands will continue to act on trend forecasts, because the alternative -- making genuinely independent creative decisions -- is harder and scarier.

But I think the consumer relationship with all of this is changing. The customer who is doing their own research, who is buying what they actually want rather than what they are told to want, who is comfortable wearing last season's piece because they like it -- that customer is not well served by the trend industrial complex, and they increasingly know it.

The most useful thing the industry could do, in my assessment, is get much better at understanding the difference between what is genuinely new and interesting and what is simply being labeled as such for commercial reasons. Consumers are already making this distinction. The industry is catching up slowly.

About the Author

James Calloway

Trend Strategist  ·  New York

James has a background in consumer psychology and works with brands on trend forecasting. He is interested in why people buy things, not just what they buy.

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