Fashion Snoops launches new Fashion Foresight report

By

Cajsa Lykke Carlson

Published
Jul 1, 2015

When fashion designer Lilly Berelovich grew frustrated with the subpar trend resources available to her as a fashion designer, she decided to start her own.

That was the beginning of Fashion Snoops, which launched in 2000 and was one of the first online trend services at the time. Today, the company has more than 100 international contributors and covers hundred of trade shows, exhibitions, events, festivals and more.

This year the company also introduced the FS Culture + Creative Advisory, which “provides a unique and valuable outside culture-to-product perspective." Fashion Snoops has recently teamed up with brands including Mattel and Reebok, and now it has also launched "Fashion Foresight: How Fashion Illustrates the World's Most Pressing Mega Trends."

The report covers a number of MegaTrends and shows how fashion can function as a bellwether to understand cultural shifts. It looks, for example, at how changing gender norms are predicted in fashion. As the number of fathers who stay home with their kids has doubled since 1989, so the growth of menswear has outpaced that of womenswear for the past 5 years. The projected global income of women by 2018 is $18 trillion, and the report shows how women's fashion changes accordingly, with the rise of the "Athleisure" lifestyle, the result of a demand for versatility.

Another issue raised in the report is that of "Climate Apartheid," a growing wealth disparity created by those who have and don't have climate-controlled accommodations for extreme weather. Fashion is responding by investing in alternatives to traditional cotton.

As transgenderism is increasingly gaining global acceptance and there are 700,000 transgender individuals in the US, the fashion industry is once again leading the way, with gender-neutral clothing lines like Selfridges "Agender." The report contains many more examples of how fashion trends can set or mirror the global cultural agenda.