I went to a seminar about fashion trends. It was focused on colours, textures and lifestyle themes. It predicted the rise of “A Brown Age”, which sounds ominous indeed, but essentially boils down to brown replacing black as the base colour. The actual content is not important.
The important things from that seminar were 4 things.
3 quotes that severely impact the credibility of anything the speaker had to impart on the audience, and 1 answer to a question I was privileged enough to get an answer to in the Q&A after the talk.
Plants are people too!
Unnamed Trend Forecaster
There is a person in South Africa who can talk to plants and trees via telepathy.
Unnamed Trend Forecaster
Trees are more intelligent than us.
Unnamed Trend Forecaster
These statements make any further conversation difficult for someone with my worldview. However, this is a world renowned trend forecaster, and I had to exercise some curiosity.
This question and answer are paraphrased, because it’s a while ago and I have less-than-perfect recall.
Q: What is it you see, do you think, that perhaps others do not see? A: I just listen a lot. I go to places like Milan and (insert other fashion cities) and I see what people are doing.
So while the speaker has strange views on the place of trees in our world, and believes they’re probably more intelligent than we are, they also have an acute understanding of their job as a “trend forecaster”.
In reality the job is to go to places where movements start, and notice them, and tell everybody about them. The trend forecaster is a “Sneezer” in Seth Godin’s language, or a “Connector” in Malcolm Gladwell’s language. They notice, and then they tell everyone. And happily, some of them are able to do it for a living. The more trusted they are as experts, the more effectively they can predict, because their causal effects are amplified.