Creating trends

I have always wondered who or what it is that decides what is trendy. When I was younger, I thought it was the girly magazines that made this important decision. My friends and I used to read the top ten lists of what is in and what is not to make sure we didn’t show up with something that was totally out of fashion. At that time, following trends were looked upon as very important, at least among my friends and classmates, but it wasn’t just us that had to follow these trend rules, it was our parents too.

I bet you all have old photos of your parents that you at some point in life have felt quite embarrassed about. For me, one of those is a photo of my mom in a fake leopard coat, shot in the 1970’s. I found that coat in our basement store when I was in high school and stuffed it into a black plastic bag, hiding it well just to make sure she wouldn’t wear it in public again. At that time leopard patterned fabrics was looked upon as “a big no no” and it was always mentioned in the magazine articles as “Trends we never want to see again”. Finally, that leopard coat was given away to charity when we cleaned our basement store and I made it clear that I absolutely didn’t want to inherit it.

When I was nineteen I started to dance Arabic dance and made a lot of new friends from the Middle East. In this dance culture, trends were totally different from the common trends in the Swedish society, for example, leopard patterns were looked upon as really cool. The first time, I saw one of my friends arrive to a party in a leopard patterned cat suit and I was quite shocked about her choice of clothing. Soon I realized that she wasn’t the only one wearing that pattern, almost everyone in the group did. A few weeks later when I went out shopping with one of my friends, who wasn’t in the dance group, I spotted a leopard top that I really liked. I showed it to my friend and she asked me if I was insane. However, I decided to buy it because I liked it and in my opinion it was trendy. At that time I had stopped slaving under the fashion magazines and wore what I liked. According to the fashion magazines my friends and I were totally untrendy, but we didn’t care.

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I really like leopard patterns...but sometimes it can be a little bit too much.

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Last weekend I attended a concert to see my idol Tori Amos, where she wore a leopard cat suit. I have seen her wearing the outfit in photos before and I obviously wasn’t the only one who had. The audience was full of girls wearing leopard outfits. When Tori Amos sang the phrase “I'm boycotting trends, it's my new look this season”, from the track Girl Disappearing, it came clear to me what impact artists have in creating trends. Maybe she is totally untrendy according to the fashion magazines but her style was as trendy as could be for us. Trends are not only created by designers or fashion magazines. It is also created by communities, idols and a lot of other factors. Referring to my last blog post, Emmelie answers my question about what fashion is: “It's a shallow way to show off who I am”. If I could turn back the time, I would never have given away my mom’s leopard coat. It would have been so cool to wear it this autumn, not because it’s the ‘in’ thing according to the fashion magazines, but because I really like it.

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Tori Amos in a leopard catsuit at the concert in Madison Square Garden.