Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

The making and marketing of a trend 301
ethnologists, cultural analysts or lifestyle consultancies such as The Future
Laboratory, Promostyl, The Intelligence Factory, BrainReserve, Trend Union,
Bug, The Henley Centre, Captain Crikey or Media Street Network, all of
whom eschew the instinct-only approach to trend analysis in favour of a more
scientific, and less problematic, methodology of making lifestyle predictions.
These can vary from the more traditional tools used by market research
companies – telephone polling, focus groups, data mining, face to face interviews,
Q&A surveys – to ones that borrow heavily on the procedures and
techniques used in the not unrelated fields of ethnology and anthropology – the
use of urban hides, field researchers, culture scouts, hidden cameras or cultural
brailling, a reading of the culture via its magazines, TV programmes,
Internet sites and chatrooms, that requires the analyst to have a thorough and
in-depth knowledge of current and emerging trends, and how these are likely
to impact on the cultural mainstream, or indeed fragment, and mutate into
something new. Dress Down Friday, and the subsequent fall-off in suit sales in
the UK and US, is a good illustration of this.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, suits were symbolic of power, position and
taste (if you wore designer ones), but also of a sense of purpose, privilege and
status. Silicon Valley, the rise of dotcom culture and the sartorial attributes
associated with it – jeans, casual shirt, no tie, cross trainers – changed all this.
Here were people who were creative, cool, engaged in some wacky and wonderful
social and societal adventure, and look, no suits! Better still, they were
wealthy with no suits. More pointedly, they looked like they were enjoying the
jobs they did, in Seattle, in Silicon Valley, in Hoxton, and yes, they seemed to
work at them longer (where our current 24-Seven culture came from), make
few distinctions between when they played at the office, or indeed when their
offices became a place for playing and partying in, and certainly when you
saw them out in bars, at Starbucks (the original dress down coffee shop), or at
a Nirvana gig, the one thing they had in common (apart from platinum Amex
cards) was the fact that they did not wear suits.
Imagine that, no suits and yet they were still earning, still respectable
members of society, still being wined and dined by old world players. But,
and this was a big but, they actually seemed to be having a good time. So
much so, many opted out and joined them – lawyers, PRs, advertizing agencies,
financial houses, venture capitalists and so on. Which made the business
behemoths of the old economy sit up and take notice. How to stop the drain?
How to keep their embattled, embittered employees happy? By making their
offices fun places to work in? By making them more egalitarian? By making
them more casual and less corporate? All of this – hence offices that now have
communal work stations, chill out areas, sleep seats, or companies that have
stakeholders instead of shareholders, many of the stakeholders being valued
employees they want to keep. But, on top of this, they also allowed people to
dress casual, to feel creative by looking creative. In other words, imitating the
dress sense of the Silicon Valley set.
In trend reporting and analysis, this kind of behaviour is called mirroring,
or the placebo effect – where one socio-economic group hopes that wearing