fashionthunder.com

With fashion in constant flux, there is a strong argument for producing a trend book that can be updated not every season, but every day. An online service called the Worth Global Style Network (www.wgsn.com) has dramatically changed the way trends are monitored. 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 New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Milan, Barcelona and half a dozen other cities. As well as daily fashion business news, it delivers interviews, analyses, surveys, city reports, coverage of trade shows, and thousands of photographs of stores, runway 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. Not surprisingly, its extensive client list covers everybody who is anybody in fashion and retail, from Abercrombie & Fitch to Zara.
The WGSN headquarters on London’s Edgware Road resembles the bustling editorial floor of a major newspaper, with dozens of journalists tapping away at keyboards. And I’m assured that there are many others, out snapping the latest trends with digital cameras. ‘It’s amazing that [the traditional style bureaux] let us into the market without a fight,’ observes Roger Tredre, WGSN’s editor-in-chief. ‘Most of them still don’t have an online service to speak of, while we’ve been around for more than six years.’
But WGSN is no fly-by-night dotcom – it sees the web merely as a means to an end. ‘We’ve never used the term dotcom internally,’ Tredre says, ‘because it has all the wrong connotations for us. We perceive ourselves as a research and information company that just happens to use the internet as the quickest means of diffusion. With the everchanging nature of fashion, speed is of the essence.’
He adds that WGSN does not so much predict trends as provide vital intelligence for a multi-billion-pound industry: ‘But of course, part of our job is to monitor cutting-edge trends, and to explain how these might be interpreted for the mass market.’
Other trend-trackers act not so much as consultants to the fashion industry, but as observers of cultural shifts that may have an impact on product development. One such agency is Style-Vision, founded in 2001 (www.style-vision.com). Alongside its bi-monthly ‘mega-trends’ reports, it produces surveys of individual industries (not just fashion, but also food, personal care and technology, among others) and regularly holds round-table conferences on evolving consumer trends. Usually staged at exclusive hotels or villas in the south of France, these events attract leading marketing directors, advertising creatives, designers, architects, branding experts and journalists.
Style-Vision’s business development director, Genevieve Flaven, says, ‘Our goal is to provide a rational analysis of societal changes, as well as forecasting developments that may have an impact on design. We’re also interested in mixing consumer insights and expertise from different industries. We’re very practical – there’s no crystal ball, and we’re not gurus. The main thing we strive to avoid is treating consumers as if they’re malleable and somewhat naïve. We realize that we’re all consumers – intelligent human beings with highly complex responses to the world around us.’
In fact, says Flaven, the agency is less concerned with predicting trends than in getting inside consumers’ heads. ‘We’re interested in individuals in the context of society. Through our research among consumers and opinion-formers, we imagine future scenarios, how consumers will react to them, and what kind of products and services they might require within those scenarios.’
Ironically, though, the only people really in touch with the latest trends are those who create them – on the streets. Consumers themselves, particularly young ones, are more iconoclastic, inquisitive and inventive than any designer armed with a WGSN password and a stack of trend reports. No sooner has a marketing executive told adolescents that this is the correct way to wear a pair of jeans, than they’ve torn off the waistband and started wearing them differently. The classic argument runs that, once a trend has crossed over into the mainstream, it is already out of date.
The fashion industry is the ultimate fashion victim.

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