On Trend by Devon Powers

Author:Devon Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Trends are commodities made up of stories about the future. Trend forecasters create them through techniques of trend perception, sorting the world into patterns that suggest crucial, unavoidable changes. Trend forecasters’ expertise balances the mystique of intuitive understanding against a data-driven mastery of exorbitant information. Though their services are unique, they are part of a seemingly ever-growing battalion of consultancies that provide corporations with know-how and vision that, for whatever reason, they do not produce sufficiently within themselves.

There are many reasons why trend forecasting flourishes among management consultancies, brand strategists, and other types of advisement. For one, the trend forecasting industry plays an active role in creating the perception of a world overrun with change. While far from the only actors engaging in this creation, for them, doing so is an existential matter. Unless they can convince their clients that trends are ways to manage information overload, competently measure the future, and strategically intervene, trend forecasting ceases to matter. Trends are performative insofar as they usher into being the conditions for their existence, which forecasters then position themselves to address. Trends provide an illusion of control in the face of precariousness.

But the trend industry is performative in a second way. In a perfectly corporate, infinitely digestible, exhilarating yet safe fashion, it models the look and feel of futurity. Trends are the scripts through which forecasters conduct their professional lives and manifest their professional identities. It justifies Shingy’s haircut, it explains the gorgeous imagery that fills trend reports, and it rationalizes why companies like the Future Laboratory have an in-office beekeeper. As much as the business of trends attempts to manage the future, it must also maintain its allure, mystique, and wonderment. Trends are ways of seeing and understanding, measuring and assessing, communicating and acting. Most of all, they serve to distinguish between those who know and those who don’t know—those who show the way to the future and those who, if they can even find it, are just hoping that they will fit through the door.

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