Tuesday 25 May 2010

Promostyl, Past and Present



Next week Promostyl, the French agency acknowledged to have created the very first fashion trend forecasting book, is showing their Influences presentation for F/W 2011.
My first job in trend forecasting was consulting in their New York office. The story goes that in 1966, Françoise Vincent-Ricard, a consultant working in the French textile industry, realized the potential for a "go-between" who made sure that textile manufacturers understood what fashion designers would need a year later and that designers knew what clothes consumers would want to wear another year after that. She set up a small team to work with their first clients, six textile manufacturers. Hence, Promostyl and the notion of the trend forecasting agency was born. By the time I came to the company in the late '90s it was run by the formidable Stebastian de Diesbach and his wife Danielle. When I look back at the "Eureka Moments" of my life thus far, I can honestly say that the first time I saw Promostyl's "Influences" trend book was one of them. The combination of Macro-trend information and descriptions of the consumer groups (Tribes) associated with them was fascinating to me. It married two of my interests, social anthropology (the subject of my degree) and fashion, in a way I never before thought possible. It proved to be the corner stone of my own theory of trend forecasting, that socio/cultural/economic global trends trickle down to influence seasonal themes in every area of consumerism, from colors, materials, fashion and home furnishings to consumer goods and cars. A trend is something that can be traced, has a history and a present tense. All the better to predict the future!



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