Trend Forecasting, Taste and Fashion Production

This chapter outlines a workshop enabling instructors to engage students with the various processes by which trends and taste are formed—including in the field of trend prediction. The chapter situates notions of taste and trend in the context of the production of fashion. In addition to shedding light on trend forecasting as an area within the “culture industries” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972: 94–136), our program also offers a conceptual framework through which to understand and interrogate cultural production more generally. This theoretical context will include the theories of Pierre Bourdieu as outlined by Celia Lury in Consumer Culture (2014) and Joanne Entwistle as described in The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion (2009), as well as the more recent work of Mathilda Tham (2015) with its emphasis on creativity, sustainability, and ethics. In the proposed workshop, students are introduced to a broad range of theories of taste, consumption, and emulation derived from Simmel (1957), Blumer (1969), McRobbie (1988, 1998), Hebdige (1988), and Veblen (1994 [1899]). Students gain a vocabulary with which to describe and analyze the formation of taste in relation to class, cultural production and mediation, personal expression, issues surrounding diversity, group identity, and subcultural membership. They consider a variety of models of fashion transmission, including trickle down (Simmel, 1957; Laver, 1969; Veblen, 1994 [1899]), collective selection (Blumer, 1969), and bubble up (Polhemus, 1994; Thornton, 1997; Church Gibson, 2006). Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital” elaborated and updated by Entwistle will be compared to Sarah Thornton’s concept of subcultural capital (1997). Students may benefit from considering the ways in which trends have emanated from marginalized and economically disadvantaged groups (as well as from elites)