How are clothing trends born?
Lime green, mustard yellow and lagoon blue are in fashion this summer. To be convinced, just take a tour at Monoprix, Camaïeu or Comptoir des Cotonniers. But why precisely these colors? At this moment?
If we follow the trail of a trend, we often end up with a “style office”. These forecasting agencies offer players in the fashion industry “trend books”. These are large magazines, sold at gold prices - up to 4,000 euros - and filled with photos, sketches and explanatory texts. They present, 18 months in advance, what the trends will be for this or that season.
However, the style offices do not use soothsayers, crystal balls or fortune-tellers. On the contrary, they claim a rational methodology. Pierre-François Le Louët, president of Nelly Rodi, one of the 5 historic style offices, admits however that at the beginning, in the 1960s, style offices worked with intuition:
“But today the economic stakes are considerable. The industry weighs billions of euros. We can't just guess at the future with a wet finger. So we established an operation, a method. ”
First step: collection. Nelly Rodi has a network of 21 correspondents spread all over the world. They are responsible for detecting what they call "weak signals" in their lingo. They identify what is happening again, in all sectors of society: art, consumption, distribution, culture, etc. In the infinite mass of events and novelties, the difficulty is therefore to distinguish what makes sense and what does not. According to Pierre François Le Louët:
“It's about determining what companies value. Local? The International? Women? The masculine? Rigor? Fantasy?"
But if these values may appear very vague to the layman, the “weak signals” are, on the contrary, very concrete elements. It could be the opening of a surf shop in the center of downtown Tokyo, the boom of tinted skin creams in Seoul or, in a completely different field, the emergence of nationalist movements ...
Trend committees
Correspondents collect this data and send it to style offices. Then, twice a year, the “trend committees” meet. Different professions are present: stylists of course, but also colorists or sociologists. After crossing and analyzing the data, they create themes, four per season.
For winter 2013-2014, Nelly Rodi is developing the theme “Modesty”. Pierre-François Le Louët gives some examples, among a hundred, of what inspired this theme:
"The development of farmer markets, that of local currencies, fashion personalities who want to have a modest approach, the explosion of the Williamsburg district in New York, the new Scandinavian designers who value authenticity and who do not parade, the natural materials used by designers ... »
Each theme is associated with an atmosphere, colors, materials, shapes, etc. All this is illustrated in the trend books and accompanied by socio-economic deciphering. Each theme is declined in different fields: clothing fashion but also design, tableware, make-up, cosmetics, portable technologies, bath sheets ...
Do not operate in a vacuum
But according to Sophie Levasseur, collection director at Camaïeu, trend books are not the only source of inspiration for stylists:
“A lot can influence us. What is happening in the street, a film that goes to the cinema, parades ... But notebooks are important to know if we are in the right direction and not to operate in a vacuum. I look at all the notebooks and then I take the one that I like the most, the one that jostles me. But I can't use everything systematically. We analyze the notebook, we digest it, we translate it. And then we have to respect the style of Camaïeu. We know our customers, we know what they like. The main directions, I have to translate them into T-shirts. ”
Another major source of inspiration for stylists: the fashion shows in January and March. They influence what will be sold a few months or even a few weeks later in stores. The fashion industry is today in a process of constant updating. Everything is going very quickly, according to Pascaline Wilhelm, fashion director at Premiere Vision:
“We are in an extremely changing market. The products must be constantly renewed, the race against time has accelerated in an extraordinary way. Before there were two collections a year. Now we have capsule collections that last two weeks, we have specific collections for the holiday season ... The advent of brands like H&M and Zara have changed everything. We produce in a much shorter time. They have pulled the market towards much more flexibility, flexibility. In 15 years, the industry has experienced a real industrial revolution. ”
In an emergency - particularly bad weather in summer, for example - Camaïeu can thus design, produce and distribute new products in 6 weeks.
Despite this hectic pace of continual renewal, brands do not change their collections entirely from year to year. Sophie Levasseur specifies that one of the basic rules is, as often, to renew what has sold well:
“But we have to rework what worked. Our customers do not want reheated! Renewal is very important. Our collections are a mixture of history and trends. ”
The egg and the chicken
But where do these trends ultimately come from? Fashion professionals assure that they are born of themselves, spontaneously within society, and that they ultimately only detect them. But for trends sociologist Guillaume Erner - who also presents Service Public on France Inter - it's the opposite. It is industry which, by shining the spotlight on a particular color or a particular shape, creates fashion. It is then adopted by consumers. During a conference given at the French Fashion Institute in 2009, Guillaume Erner thus explained the genesis of a trend:
“The first law that is obvious is self-fulfilling prophecy. Trends are stratified like a stock market and in this market there are Warren Buffets, there are oracles, there are prophets. For example, the Colette store is an important market place. When an object is placed there, it becomes fashionable ipso facto. For a moment, we wondered how Colette was doing to find out what was going to become fashionable. Today, we know that the sociological problem is completely opposite. It is in fact the oracular function of Colette that makes any object selected by her will become fashionable whatever it is. This self-fulfilling prophecy will work until Colette herself ceases to be fashionable. ”
The problem with this theory is that it does not explain how Colette reached this lucrative and coveted place of Oracle ...
So who influences whom? Is it the street or is it the fashion professionals who are setting the trend? Vincent Grégoire, director of the Art of Living department at Nelly Rodi, found a good formula to answer this eternal question:
"My job is to anticipate consumer behavior and then lobby to make it happen anyway."
Style offices do not choose their themes by chance. To remain credible, what they expect must actually happen. For Pierre-François Le Louët, the best way to assess the quality of his work is to observe the evolution of his turnover. With 6 million euros per year, he says that the agency Nelly Rodi has never looked so good. A trend or a prophecy?
