COVER STORY:After a decade of indulging in the safety of vintage style, fashion will be ready to look ahead by 2013, according to WGSN, the world's crystal ball when it comes to predicting trends. London Editor MARK HENNESSYspends some time in the company with the cutting edgeI
IN AN ART DECO building in London, once the home of the Carreras cigarette company and one that Adolf Hitler planned to use as his British headquarters after occupation, a trend-forecasting company, seeks to tell the future. WGSN started in 1998 with just five people. It was sold by its founders for about €160 million five years ago and is now part of the Emap publishing giant. Every day it supplies fashion designers and ad agencies, along with companies across the spectrum of business, with future trends and forecasts. The stakes for all concerned are huge.
“Getting it right means that a company sells what it has in the store, without having to put it on sale, or to write products off,” says the company’s chief executive, Susanna Kempe.
The language of WGSN is a blizzard of titles and nicknames for groups and trends: “Millenials” are those born, for instance, between 1980 and 2000, who are becoming more important as they “directly sway consumer habits”.
“This hybrid consumer is overwhelmed with information but is adept at finding ways to filter and absorb it,” according to WGSN research, which impresses the importance of remaining relevant to this generation, as their filter methods become faster and more brutal.
“They are part of the millennial generation, who have witnessed the world’s transformation via an explosion of digital technology, the internet and global recession,” it says, “and they are set to run the world in 25 years’ time.”
Having grown up in a digital age, this generation of consumer is hardwired for internet culture, according to WGSN. They are shaping what the research calls “a new frontier of human interaction via digital technology”, as well as heralding the arrival of “politicised consumer power through the internet”.
“They care about corporate transparency, the future of the environment, getting an education without getting into debt, and honest simplicity,” says the research, one of 650,000 papers put together by WGSN during its lifetime.
Sometimes, the forecaster’s prose is breathless: “Globally, people are reacting to a state of overwhelmed confusion – we have too much and we know too much. But 2012 will also see the world prepared to enter a new state of wonder – pushing against boundaries and looking to be awed.”
Breathless, or not, WGSN’s book are filled with nearly every major retailer, each searching for that tiny advantage that could put it ahead of competitors.
EVERY DAY, A NECKLACE of contributors – writers and journalists, artists of all types, exhibition curators and industry experts – feed in their thoughts to the offices on the Hampstead Road, near Mornington Crescent tube station.
Twice a year, the WGSN’s editors gather to brainstorm for two days, filtering the ideas, deciding what the jumble means. Right now, the Navajo and Hopi Indian cultures are influential, finding expression in thousands of fashion designs.
From there, a stream of reports is produced, along with six sets of designs for products that are freely available to its web of clients: “Some take our designs. Others obviously want to put their own signature on it,” says Kempe.
The fashion shows of New York, London, Paris and Milan, the show-pieces of the international fashion trade, are central parts of the cycle, and are followed by another stream of ideas from WGSN on what manufacturers must start working on immediately.
WGSN never copies, says Kempe. “We look across the whole of the catwalk and say, ‘This is what is being picked up.’ We feed various parts of the cycle, the designers and later the manufacturers and retailers,” she says.
The company’s advice is heeded, judging by its client list, a who’s who of leading fashion brands and retailers, along with those in other industries equally dependent upon the changing zeitgeist.
Often, the ideas on the catwalk go too far for the public, such as the trend this year for Victorian clothing buttoned-up to the neck. “People don’t want to wear that, but we suggested detaching the collar and cutting fabric away to reveal the shoulders or chest for a bolder, sexier, more wearable look,” says WGSN’s Kate Cullinan.
The West’s economic crisis, now four years old and showing no signs of ending, is not only reflected in a decision not to shop; it also finds expression in the things people buy and the choices that they make. In children’s clothing, for example, preferences have moved towards wanting clothes that can be handed down to younger siblings, leading to an increase in sales for canvass and knits “because they are durable”.
Equally, tastes have drifted towards primary colours “because people see them as being much more true and honest”, say Kempe, who took over the reins at WGSN in 2009. The desire left by the crisis for comfort, warmth and safety is illustrated by the phenomenal success of onesies – one-piece, fleece-lined, hooded pyjamas – or romper suits now available in an endless variety of styles. “Everybody who is under-25 is wearing them, or looking for them. Primark sold out of them in the first week. As heating bills rise people just want comfort, the feeling of being safe and cuddled,” says Cullinan.
Equally, pervasive technology is provoking a kick-back from the public: “We see a trend around ‘deteching’. Some of the early signals of that came in the US, where six million Facebook accounts were deleted last year.
“Facebook is still growing globally, but not in its most mature market,” Kempe says, adding that this desire to be free of being contactable at all times is now even beginning to be reflected, counterintuitively, in advertising. In Thailand, for example, the mobile telephone company DTAC has rolled out a campaign where family members disappear on screen each time a technology-addict starts to use another piece of equipment, returning only after the instrument is put aside. “The concept is that technology should be about social cohesion, not social breakdown,” says Kempe.
Her colleague, “People are bombarded with messages and they want to comprehend the things around them, not just fragmented images.” says Sue Evans, WGSN’s catwalks editor and a veteran of the London fashion-scene since the 1960s.
“It is about people making the choices, rather than being told. It is about being an individual again. You see that in the way that people have begun actually to delete ‘friends’, rather than simply having them on their list because they don’t have the choice,” she says.
The move towards a decluttered life is reflected, too, in retail trends, says Evans, where “white-box retailing”, allowing products to “breathe” in minimalist displays, is becoming fashionable
Trends are now taking longer to gather momentum, according to WGSN. “People are taking a lot longer to buy into an idea. People are not very sure about what the future will bring, but we know what the past held,” she says.
Ethnic style, once looked down on by western societies with condescension, says Kemp, is now a world trend, as the West’s centuries-old dominance declines. The results can be seen in everything from fashion to cooking: “What it does is give equal weight to different cultures. It is found a lot in cooking now, where ethnic styles are mixed with organic products, for instance,” says Kempe.
“In a reaction to globalisation we feel the need to conserve and enjoy the local,” WGSN argues in one of its research documents. “This is not an attempt to exclude but to celebrate community and culture, and to invite the rest of the word to share in the experience.”
It may also presage a deeper look at globalisation and the impact that it has on lives: “There could be a rise in nationalism, which could be a dangerous thing,” says Cher Potter, the company’s editor of creative direction and macro trends.
Each year, WGSN produces a three-year forecast for manufacturers who have to make decisions far in advance: “We start that far out because we have to do so, looking at the materials, the styles, the trends that we think will be then in play,” says Kempe.
In its report on 2013, it predicts: “Anything contemporary will see a huge resurgence in interest, as opposed to the passion for all things vintage we have seen in recent years, and buzz words such as insight, facts, truth, certainty and understanding will be key.”
The influence of the Spanish clothing manufacturer Zara has revolutionised the fashion trade, since it is able to turn out new designs in five weeks and complete 34 collections a year, while most others stay limited to “spring/summer, autumn/winter, and maybe a cruise line”, says Kempe.
Equally, WGSN is constantly monitoring for “bubble-up” trends, sparked by some transient social influence, such as a celebrity’s clothing choice. This is “the Kate Middleton effect”, so-called because of the surge in demand internationally for copies of her engagement dress.
The hunt for the latest fashion is still as strong as ever, says Kate Cullinan. “People can get really wound up if they meet somebody at a party wearing something before them. For young people, fashion is a way for people to communicate.”
The high street is moving online, leaving retailers fretting about global competition. “The Middleton engagement sold out around the world because everybody can keep with the latest fashions.”
The effect is most evident in Australia, where retailers are under enormous pressure from online retailers in the UK, such as Asos, Net-A-Porter or mywardrobe.com, and more traditional retailers, such as Topshop, that have invested heavily in an online presence.
Clients remain wedded to WGSN’s services, because it is able to stand over its past predictions, Cullinan says. “Customers like to see confirmation of what we said would happen a year ago.”
Fashion writers and bloggers may be able to give their take on the future, “but they are not able to give original artwork that designers can work with and they don’t have the credibility of being able to forecast and then confirm”, says Kempe.
The world’s population, WGSN says, is only now beginning to come to terms with the new century, having indulged in the safety of looking back to the more glamorous 1930s and 1940s and the more optimistic 1950s and 1960s.
“We have had quite a ‘retro’ era, where everybody has hammered on about the past: from the 1960s/1970s right back to the 1930s. There was no movement that was looking forward,” says Sue Evans. “It is interesting that that happened at a time when everybody is so technologically savvy. But they were all feel-good eras, or, in the case of the 1930s and 1940s, eras that were dressy and stylish.”
The psychological mood of a time influences everything, says Cher Potter: “We are seeing a lot of colour. I think people are buying it because they want the optimism that it brings. People wear plain colours to play it safe. Strong colours are about optimism.” But we have been here before, a century ago, when people were “still waiting for things to happen in 1912”, says Evans, who spends much of her time watching the catwalks of London, Paris, New York and Milan.
The millennium, she says, was “a huge watershed”, psychologically. “It was like an abyss. Nobody knew what would happen. That is why people have looked back, because it was all so scary.”
The mentality of a time affects everything, Evans says, pointing to a recent publication that shows how the mood in the early part of the 20th century kept house colours muted, before they began to explode into life in 1912: “People could look forward to the future.”
The world in 2012
CONSUMERS WILL FEEL:
A sense of triumph over adversity
A new-found desire for beauty and developed style
A need to creatively express themselves and a thirst for the fresh, unusual and surprising
Renewed energy for an incredible future and acceptance of the "new"
Positive and excited about the increased speed of change
The need for a stable, organised base in the form of home, family and responsible society
The desire to edit and lighten up
The need for filters in order to surround themselves with only exactly what they want
Permission, often through technology, to start from scratch
And coming in 2013
The three key looks are Idiomatic, Wonderlab and The Story of Now.
Idiomatic explores local eccentricities from around the world in "an anthropological story" that "pays homage to the traditional".
Wonderlab proclaims that science is cool and no longer nerdish and looks to nature's natural organisms for its shapes and prints, which are fluid, right back to our own selves in clothes that will be body contouring. But technical apparatus, diagrams and terminology will be in here too.
The Story of Now will nail and archive our digital age for future generations. Prints and graphics come from analogue and digital sources and typographical motifs.
Emma Cullinan
