What is a trend? What role do trends play in consumer culture? How do trends come into being? And how do trends shape the future? This book explores these and other questions through a focus on the business of trend forecasting, an industry that emerged in the 1970s to anticipate, manage, and influence the future of culture. Trend forecasters advise some of the world's most prominent companies on how to innovate, disrupt, strategize, and otherwise manage the future. In addition to the early history of trend forecasting, the book examines how current trend professionals do what they do, taking stock of contemporary practices and exposing their built-in assumptions. In sum, On Trend argues that trends have become an important way to sell cultural change, and as such they deeply shape and profoundly limit our ideas about what the future can be. |