Paper short abstract:

This paper reveals the imaginative techniques of the future in a Parisian trend forecasting agency that anticipates trends. Its trend forecasters must create certainty for brands, but the uncertain economic context blurs their job's long-term projection as well as their company's.

Paper long abstract:

If there is one versatile and complex phenomenon that marks our contemporary world, it is fashion. Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult to anticipate its future due to the exponential evolution of trends propelled by the fast fashion system that creates an incessant demand for novelty. To counter its uncertainty, brands must anticipate upstream the newest trends. To do so, they turn to the foresight services offered by trend forecasting offices which promise to guarantee them a prosperous future.

My research followed one of these agencies in Paris to understand how they anticipate social trends. Its employees, who are as much foresight analysts as strategic planners and stylists, transmit their socio-cultural analyses, two years in advance, to their client companies in the form of a "trend book" or by providing consulting services. These tools shape "socio-aesthetic" scenarios that represent trends likely to meet the needs and desires of consumers.

In this paper, I analyse the future paradox that this field stands on. On one hand, these actors, set up as fashion oracles, have a full legitimacy in deciding the future of trends to give certainty for brands. The ethnography highlights the imaginative techniques of new trend scenarios which is based on an experimental methodology that follows a dynamic routine. But, on the other hand, the harsh and uncertain socio-economic context in which the current capitalist logic imposes "tight flow" conditions, reveal the difficulties to project themselves into their own company in the long run, with no scenarios of their future.