I had a few more thoughts since the last post. The notion that technology doesn’t go into fashion was a mistake.

Take florescent colors for instance.

In the 80′s it became big because you could not easily make the florescent fabrics before that. It was new. It became the next thing because it was novel.

Then it became overused and blammo, it was out of style.

Eventually the cycle repeats and the styles come and go.

But other things aren’t really a technology breakthrough. A good example is eyeglasses — the technology behind glasses hasn’t changed in decades, but what’s “in” does.

Why is that?

Celebrities for one. John pointed out Drew Carey with his iconic thick glasses. John pointed out that the glasses became a lot more common after that.

But this is taking a step towards the media. People are celebrities because there is the media. Without the media the notion wouldn’t really exist. Of course I’m using the term “media” broadly; not just TV classifies as media. You can have celebrities back in the days of the town crier.

Taking it a step further though, the reporting of trends — now or future trends — makes it a reality.

The media is the unwitting cabal.

It’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principal of reportage — you can’t report on something without simultaneously affecting it. The news predicts the future since the future reflects the past news.

En and I watched an episode of Project Runway last night. It was tapes back around May of this year. In it they said something along the lines of “You have to make a collection for the fall of this year — here’s what’s going to be hot then.”

This of course begs the question “how do you know what’ll be hot in half a year?”

We had a debate about this and I think that it can be boiled down to two conflicting arguments.

1) The top designers are the top designers because they are good at noticing trends that are beginning before anyone else goes down that avenue. Even the top designers aren’t immune to getting panned if they read things wrong. John made a fairly compelling argument for this point.

2) There is a fashion designer “cabal” that gets together to decide what will be hot. It doesn’t take much to make this conspiracy theory work: all you need is a few designers to be in cahoots with some fashion magazines that proclaim “this is the hot new thing.” The reporting makes the reality. Ok, so I don’t think a small group of designers huddle together in a dark room as the word “cabal” implies. Really it’s more a factor of a small community doing group-think.

I think it’s a lot of 2 mixed with a little of 1.

What say you?