Have you ever wondered just how ‘trends’ get started and shape what’s on your shopping list? Rescu. has the answer – and it may surprise you.
You’ve heard it before – designers, after a horde of similar looks come down a season’s runways, claiming that they were ‘inspired’, that it was ‘the feel of the streets’, that ‘things were moving in that direction’.
Trends are a vague business. It’s always intriguing when an entire set of high-end designers apparently sit down at a meeting, decide what’s ‘in’ this season, and then show their interpretations of it.
Clearly this doesn’t happen – so what does?
We all know how trends are permeated. Fashion editors pick up on themes in catwalk shows, point to them in magazines, and the clothes are copied further down the food chain until the high street grabs them and bam! Authentic trend.
The question we really want to know is: Who decides where these ideas come from in the first place?
A new study has revealed the answer, and it’s actually quite intuitive. The source of all our trends? It’s the fabric companies.
It’s their job, after all, to supply a limited range of fabrics for every single season – often a year ahead of time. The designers examine the fabrics and make their choices from them. This, not on the runway, is where the trend-hunting really starts.
So the reason everybody’s showing paisley this season is down to one thing – a collection of elite fabric companies (only a few service the big names, like Chanel, Dior and Vuitton) have made the decision for us.
If you really want to know what everybody will be wearing next season, ask a researcher at one of the companies which supplies Karl Lagerfeld with his choices of material. They’ll know far before anybody else.
(And the whisper among fashion textiles producers for 2013/14? Miniature florals….)
Image: Anna Wintour, premiere tastemaker – or is she?
She’s made the cover of Vogue Italia and Elle, and now Australian plus-size model of the moment is revealing that she has bigger ambitions.
However, they’re not to do with modelling at all – quite the opposite.
Robyn Lawley wants to be a chef – and revealed to an interviewer that she’s been planning to open a restaurant in New York, which she hopes to do in the next five years.
Avid followers of the model won’t be surprised by this news. Lawley is one of the break-out successes of the non-straight-size crew, at a size 14-16, but on the side she manages a blog, Robyn Lawley Eats, devoted to her enjoyment of food and cooking.
Lawley has one of the most rapidly growing reputations in modelling. She’s already done a feature with Models.com (entitled, fittingly, The Ravishing Robyn), and has moved from being an unsuccessful straight-size model to a New York-based powerhouse.
Yet perhaps once her modelling days are over Lawley might become one of Australia’s great expat chefs. After all, she says one of her favourite quotes is George Bernard Shaw’s ‘There is no love sincerer than the love of food’.
Models with diverse talents are an increasing feature of the industry. Alek Wek manages a handbag line, Liya Kebede acts and Sophie Dahl, the most famous plus-size model of them all, slimmed down and became a best-selling cookbook and novel writer in the 2000s.
Perhaps Lawley will step into Dahl’s shoes, and we’ll have a Robyn Lawley Eats line of books… but first there’s that Vogue Paris cover to tackle.
Image: Robyn Lawley.
