The Trend Boutique

Today we had a lecture by Sally Denton the owner of "The Trend Boutique". I was excited about this lecture as I am really interested in trend prediction and wanted to understand more about the methods behind this. The Trend Boutique is an online resource, events management and trend consultancy company that works closely in collaboration with HE and FE establishments. 

The lecture opened with a quote by William Gibson "the future has already happened, it's just that it isn't very well distributed yet".  It then went on to explain the cycle of trends and the different categories of trends that come around with regards to fashion design. 

From this introduction to how trends are categorised, Sally then went on to explain "Trend Methodology" and the processes and thoughts behind trend prediction. For me this was the most interesting point of the lecture as I was fascinated to learn how new trends are formulated and then distributed via printed publications, trade shows or online resources such as The Trend Boutique. Sally explained the struggle of Research v Initiative when predicting the future trends and how they can have so many forms of influences ranging from politics and the environment to new artists and historical references. 

The second half of the lecture was then focused on the upcoming trends for 2014 and beyond. This really got me thinking about how I could incorporate some of these themes into my future projects and pushed me to research some of them further. 

I really enjoyed this lecture, it was so helpful to learn what went into trend prediction and made me think about expanding out my own research into these new avenues of inspiration.