Oh my God, my nose!
Big data and little data are used to interpret tendencies, create trends and anticipate our thoughts and desires; fashion is no exception. Are we that gullable?
Guess what. Cosmetic surgery is back. It took a heavy knock when the crisis began, but it is confirmed. The comeback began in Asia, especially in Korea, and spread. Why has this happened, and how do we know? The why is not too difficult. For a long time there has been a trend in Asia that popularised caucasian facial features and instead of leaving things up to genetics, the scalpel can do the job faster. For the rest of the world we have the selfie to thank. Plastic surgeons adore selfies.
Never before have we looked at our faces so often, and even more importantly, so closely. The resolution of the modern mobile phone allows us, as photographers say, to pixel peep. We see everything. And most of what we see is distorted. All cameras distort to some extent, but when we hold one at arm's length, even more so. Of course, what is closest to the camera (the nose) gets bigger. I repeat: plastic surgeons love selfies.
That is the why, but what about the other question? How do we know?
Trend Watching has been around as a serious interpreter of social change since the early 1990s and grew parallel with the Internet. Like the Internet it started out small (Little Data) and then grew exponentially into what we now call Big Data.
The original Trend Watchers were in fact people, invited by British university observatories to attempt to identify tendencies that were taking place in various parts of the world and form correlations that did not follow normal statistical patterns. The relevance of the information collected would be analysed by others with no connection to the data. Our cosmetic surgery trend is an excellent example. It is a result of two different phenomena on opposite sides of the world establishing a change. The why becomes irrelevant.
When Trend Watching started up, one of the places chosen was Barcelona. True, the Catalan capital was already established as a design centre, but that was not the main reason, as Trend Watching is not only about design or fashion. It is simply about trends. The idea focused on places that had recently undergone structural changes, were in the process of those changes or about to begin. Barcelona was fresh out of a dictatorship, Berlin, Prague and Budapest were in the process, Seoul was tipped to challenge the hegemony of Tokyo in Asia, Nairobi was seen as becoming the African capital of reference. But where does this fit in with fashion?
Colour is no joke. It is deadly, and more importantly, financially serious. Since the year 2000, twice a year, Pantone gather a group of colour experts together in a top-secret meeting in a top-secret European location to decide on the coming year's official colour. Top secret. For 2016 there has been a big change, as this is the first time the experts agreed on a “blend” of two colours. Not a prefect blend, because that would result in a new colour, but rather a desire to see the outcome of various blends. Joined together, say the experts, “Rose Quartz and Serenity demonstrate an inherent balance between a warmer embracing rose tone and the cooler tranquil blue, reflecting connection and wellness as well as a soothing sense of order and peace.”
A trend that led Pantone to go for a colour blend was: “In many parts of the world we are experiencing a gender blur as it relates to fashion...” The London, Paris and New York fashion weeks this year all gave credence to that idea as well as the phenomenal impact of men on the fashion industry which reads the trends and then chooses how to react.
We have already seen the effects as the marketplace is filled with these very blends; Apple's new pink (rose quartz) iPhone, a nautically inspired perfume and aftershave ad on TV, the cover of a national fashion magazine where everything but the girl is in some form or other “blended”. Just a few examples.
An acceptable trend in fashion terms is welcoming lifestyle changes, such as popular sport and the wellness industry in general, to become a catalyst for new design. A case in point of fashion's attitude to trends are tattoos, especially on women. No one denies the popularity of body art in Western societies today, but few in fashion accept it as a real trend. In modelling for instance, a few tasteful tattoos, easily hidden, cause no problem. More than that and models know their options, and future, are limited. Occasionally heavily tattooed models do well in high impact advertising, but in mainstream fashion, no.
Nowadays we hear a lot about Big Data, and it is making a decided impact on fashion. Masses of seemingly unrelated data being fed through computers to discover points of convergence and divergence and reach conclusions unheard of just a few years ago. But fashion is inherently based on intuition combined with creativity and this is where Little Data can stand up to Big Brother rather well.
Pantone: colour's King
When we think of fashion, colour always plays a significant part in the whole process. But exactly, what is colour? Basically it is divided into three parts: hue (tonality), saturation (density) and luminosity (how much light is permitted to pass through the spectrum). Colour perhaps is what we find in nature and we are tempted to think of that as meaning it is free. In fact, there is an enormous science behind colour on every level. We, however, are concerned with design, and this is where the New York company Pantone come in. Founded in the 1950s, Pantone has come to think of colour as being its own property and the legal standing is certainly unclear, due to its proprietary “1,114 spot colour” process being far more accurate and maleable than the traditional printers' CMYK system. In fashion, design of any kind, photography, art, marketing or advertising, Pantone has played an enormous part in giving us colour pairings and palettes which are enormously influential on all levels of the fashion industry worldwide.