Predicting our future style of life

You read it here first: the most fashionable New Zealanders are taking their holidays in the nude, buying lifestyle blocks, accessorising their car interiors, wearing black and smirting — that is, flirting with their co-workers when they're forced out of the office for a cigarette.

They wear thrifty-chic! They wear Boho-chic! They wear nana-chic! They are mini-preneurs, bobos, maturialists and possibly krumpers too. Additionally, they are lazy, politically apathetic and fat.

Yes, it's true. Everyone's doing it. And the reason we know this is because of what everyone is also doing — trend spotting. Call them what you will, social fashions, psychographics, idea viruses, cultural barometers or plain old fads, but it feels as if, every week, we hear about a new one. There is a plague of trends and buzzwords.

So, although it might sound just about as stupid as saying black is the new black, there's really only one way to put it: trend watching is, well, um, trendy.

OK, so some might say social trends are nothing new. After all, there have always been social movements and they've always been documented by the media — the women's lib movement for instance, the miscreant teenagers who hung out at milk bars in the 50s, the hippies who got into free love and those odd boys who had girls' haircuts (you know, The Beatles). But the difference today is that there seem to be more social trends than ever. And they often seem to disappear the week after their announced arrival.

Back in 1998, American writer Daniel Radosh was already writing about the proliferation of trend spotters in the US media. As part of his research for this somewhat sarcastic GQ magazine feature, he looked at the covers of Time magazines from 1923 up until the 1990s because he felt they were the most accurate gauge of what the nation considers newsworthy.

Radosh found that from 1923 until 1952 most of the cover stories were devoted to those he calls "old-fashioned newsmakers", i.e. politicians, generals and sportspeople. After 1952 a few trend-spotting articles started to infect the publication, including pieces on the craze for 3-D movies and homeowners' DIY. Then, in 1966, Time published one of the most significant trend-spotting stories of the decade, the headline was "Is God Dead?"

Radosh concluded that after the magazine's attempt to answer this weighty question, "the floodgates opened. By the 70s, trend stories were a regular feature of Time, as the magazine charted the sweeping changes being wrought by the baby boomers. The trend-cover rate remained steady through the 80s. And then, in the 90s, it soared again".

Such devoted self-analysis by society was then thought to be a result of anxiety about the future and the turn of the new century. And one could argue that throughout the first years of the new millennium such trendaholism, as one media commentator christened it, has just kept on keeping on.

Since the middle of last century, the focus has moved from those broad sweeping changes with long-term effects on the community, to an epidemic of minor social fashions and fads, some of which are about as deep as Paris Hilton's cleavage.

All of which makes anyone who's currently confused as to how "girlfriends are the new husbands" — yes, another recent trend — want to ask just one thing: why? Where are these trends coming from?

Unfortunately, this turns out to be one of those chicken-or-the-egg questions. On one hand, there's a growing industry in trend spotting and it's now possible to make money by making big business aware of changes, such as men starting to wear engagement rings (yes, another recent trend). On the other hand, it could be the fault of the media as they pick up and often perpetuate trends.

Firstly to the business side. As AustraliaSCAN, a company that monitors cultural change in that country, tells potential clients on their website: "The impact of shifts in the social climate on business or government can be profound: consider the manifold effects of feminism, environmentalism and new ageism. So the earliest identification of those trends is of immense value in predicting likely future outcomes."

Another potential reason for the growth in the field may be the fact that big business never previously used cutting-edge aesthetics in designing or marketing products. But these days, it does — from computers to cars to mobile phones to clothing, there's not much that isn't touched by the magic wand of cool.

Which is why, as you read this there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of cultural observers employed to figure out what those cultural changes are and which of them might soon affect consumers' decisions. They may indeed be sitting somewhere close by checking what sort of footwear you have on and whether you're following current culinary trends.

Roughly, there are three broad groups, explains David Chalke, a social analyst and marketing strategist in Melbourne who consults for companies such as AustraliaSCAN; he's been analysing social trends in Australia and further afield for more than 30 years. "At one end, it's fairly unscientific and faddy. You get those 'all my friends are doing this so it must be true' sort of personal observations."

These, Chalke says, are the cool hunter-types and hipster fortune tellers whose work is mainly based on intuition and what they see happening at street level. Companies such as Coke and McDonald's like them. For instance, if the cool hunters tell Coke management, or maybe Coke's advertising agency, that a rock'n'roll roller-skating revival is what the kids are down with, then their next ad campaign might feature exactly that.

"Then there's the trend measurer," Chalke continues, "who tries to measure these trends a little more scienti-fically while they're happening. They can try to tell you where it's happening, who's doing it and so on. These people are in the middle of the spectrum. For them, it's half intuitive but it's also scientific."

One such company is the Amsterdam-based Trendwatching.com, which claims to have more than 4000 trend spotters in more than 70 countries. These spotters will email the company about new business ideas, consumption patterns and advertising campaigns they've noticed. The company follows it up with more concrete social research, while the spotters, some of whom are employees, may be rewarded either with products or cash.

"Call it the democratisation of trend watching as an industry: nonstop, cutting-edge, fully global, accessible to large and small companies, and thriving on citizen-spotters," says Reinier Evers, who founded Trend watching.com in 2002.

Chalke says that at the other end of the spectrum you get organisations such as the Department of Statistics, which can track a trend scientifically. They don't use any intuition and it's usually not personal. "They decide what constitutes a genuine social trend, if it lasts, using things like the national census."

However, any on-to-it Aucklanders out there who are interested in trying to convert their knowledge of alternative bands, up-and-coming fashion designers and groovy cafes into cold, hard cash, may be better off applying at an advertising agency.

Trend spotting as an occupation remains almost non-existent in New Zealand. The closest we usually get, in terms of turning trendy insight into money, might be the creative directors at ad agencies, who usually subscribe to trend reports from overseas anyway.

Spencer Willis is the general manager of 18. Based in Auckland, it's one of the few youth-market-specific research firms in the country. It employs around a dozen trend spotters casually and uses a website to solicit adolescent opinions; Willis says its job is mostly to open people's eyes to trends. "It's like if you say to someone, "there're a lot of pregnant women around, everybody's breeding'. Then that person will go out in their lunch hour and when they come back, they'll say: 'God, you're so right. I saw five of them on the street just now'."

Now we come to other side of the chicken-or-egg argument. Speaking to Willis, Chalke and others on this subject, they all believe it's not just their fault; they say that the media are the biggest culprits when it comes to today's trend-mongering.

"The media have a huge part to play [in highlighting trends]," Willis argues, "also in bastardising [the trend] and tagging it."

Forget about the hard news. Don't worry too much about the nastier trends. Just focus on anything that's, like, so hot right now. The internet and 24-hour television are so much better at doing breaking news, issues such as Hurricane Katrina or the war in Iraq, and have forced many print news publications into a more magazine-style mode, with more emphasis on opinion and analysis.

Whereas once old-school journalists focused on crime or politics, now they're just as likely to write shock-horror headlines that younger men are staying at home with the kids — also known as daddyism — and older women are staying up late and drinking lots of beer — the lad-ette trend.

Hilariously, among the trend spotting press, there's also what's become known as the Rule of Threes. Basically, this means that if you can find three examples of anything — say, two of your mates are doing it and so is one celebrity — you can call it a trend. And then all you need to do is christen your new discovery, preferably with a catchy and humorous buzzword-style moniker, because giving something a name always confers more reality and maybe a sense of control.

"We think a lot of [these trend articles] are pretty unscientific," notes James Armstrong, chief executive of Colmar Brunton in New Zealand, where they research social trends more thoroughly. "And some of them [the stories] are a bit once-over-lightly. A classic one we've had recently is this: a few of our clients have been asking whether we are concerned about the number of households that no longer have landlines. Apparently, they're using mobile phones instead. And they say, 'as a polling company, isn't that a problem for you?' But to be honest, the percentage of households actually doing that is in the low single figures. However, somebody wrote an article about it. And a lot of these things become urban myths quickly."

Chalke is more brutal in his assessment of most trend stories. "They may say that between 5 to 10 per cent of the population are doing it. But you could probably get between 5 and 10 per cent of the population to do anything," he snorts.

It's like the Rule of Threes — if you look hard enough, you're bound to find three examples of a trend somewhere. Anywhere.

Then again, maybe it's not the much-maligned media's fault. Maybe there are, in fact, far more interesting social trends around these days and they deserve to be reported. Some pundits would agree, because our society is so much more diverse these days.

Others would say rubbish. The Victorians classified their social groups, too, it's just that when they said "lower-class" it meant a whole lot of different things, much more than simply that you were the daughter of a maid and a coal miner. But they didn't bother dissecting the category much more than that.

However, these days, our ways of classifying our communities have changed. Where we were born and what our parents did is less important than it used to be. And when the daughter of the maid and the coal miner has more in common with the son of the general manager and the aristocrat, then it's what's in their heads that matters most. Hence the shift from old-fashioned demographics — your age, where you were born — to newfangled psychographics — your state of mind.

And there are other cultural forces that make the average person interested in trend spotting. "It's a form of social currency," Willis says. "It's what people talk about around the water cooler or at after-work drinks. There are three pillars [of a trend spotting conversation]. Prestige, prediction and bonding. If you know about the latest thing, somebody else will want to know too."

A glorified form of gossip in a navel-gazing, self-obsessed culture, then? Basically, Willis reckons. But he also believes it's about a basic human need. "It's about security," he says. "It's about fitting in, finding your tribe."

Chalke agrees. "At the moment society is so pluralistic and diverse, we need some stereotypes to work with. It's part of our way of coping with a world in which change is accelerating. We need to be able to identify ourselves and others and we like to justify our own lifestyles," he explains and follows up with an example.

"Imagine if you didn't know about any of these stereotypes. Some people move in next door. You'd be sitting there in your house going, 'what strange clothes our new neighbours are wearing. And why are they throwing out all the furniture and painting the house like that?' But if you did know about stereotypes, you'd just say, 'oh look at those bloody yuppies, gentrifying the neighbourhood. It's happening everywhere apparently."'

So it turns out that, despite the ludicrous, possibly fictitious nature of some of them, trend-spotting stories do serve a purpose.

"When turned on a well-selected target, the trend article can be a powerful tool for illumination or criticism," Daniel Radosh concluded back in 1998. He also quoted the author of a book on women's history who noted that the trend story is a way to include people who are not newsmakers, but who are in fact having a real impact on our culture.

But how do you tell which trends deserve attention? Developments in communication technology and the internet mean that a new social trend can go around the world in a day, from the streets of New York, where it may have been seen first, to a story in the Shanghai Daily, to your nightly current affairs show on telly, in less than a week. So is it holidaying naked, marrying early or drinking copious cocktails while swing dancing that will have an ongoing impact on your life?

As the experts will quickly point out, there's a big difference between fashions or fads and trends. Fashions and fads come and go but trends have longevity. Like organic eating, mini-preneurs and adultescents, all of which are trends that have had and will continue to have an effect on the way we live. And it's those sorts of lasting trends that companies such as 18 will try to find, then sell to clients.

"Some things are difficult to predict but you can usually base the longevity of trend on its authenticity," Willis explains. What he means by this is where the trend originated, whether it arose because of the way a certain group of people were thinking or whether it was manufactured in some way.

American author Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the marketing-must-have book The Tipping Point in which he analyses how certain ideas can spread through society like viruses, calls it the "stickiness" of a social trend.

And Chalke's theory is that: "For something to really become a trend it needs utility. That is," he explains, "it's something that's useful and it works for a large number of people."

Which is probably why, in light of all of the above, there's only one prediction with which this piece can be concluded — and please don't worry, it's based on more than just three examples. So here we go: until we get sick of talking about other people, trend spotting will continue to be trendy. Oh dear, haven't you heard? Everybody's doing it.

* Read more about what's happening in the world of food, wine, party places and entertainment in canvas magazine, part of your Weekend Herald print edition.