OUT & ABOUT English course documentary – Fashion Trends

Fashion defines personality, lifestyle, what you are. It projects the values that matter to you.

Whether you're a hippie, punk, hipster, emo, skater, or just a little bit unusual, or none of those things, you're a fashion victim.

We’re all fashion victims. Fashion has existed as long as we have had civilization. It is a product of whichever values dominate in a particular moment in time; it reflects the spirit of the age that people live in.

But the processes involved in generating trends are now more complex than ever. Fashion today is affected by many things:the interaction between consumers of different brands; what the media says; and the endless chatter on social networks. Trends often originate on the street. Brands hire ’coolhunters’, whose job it is to observe new forms of behaviour, new attitudes, and emerging designs in large urban centres, as well as how all of this is reflected on the internet.

From Camden Town London to New York's SoHo district, coolhunters spy on us to try to work out

what the next big thing in fashion will be. The very first people to adopt a new trend may at first be ridiculed for standing out and looking different.

However, when this new look becomes a trend, people called ‘trendsetters’ become admired for adopting the new look, and have a significant influence on their peers. Chainstores then adopt the new fashion and it becomes ’mainstream’. But soon people become bored by the new look, which is now old, and the cycle begins again.