My blog isn’t a latin placeholder anymore! Time to pop the champagne.
I don’t know when the obsession started, I just know when it culminated into the idea for this blog – about two years ago, I was on Season 2 of Gossip Girl for the fourth time, diligently studying the fashion of each and every episode, when I thought “what about the fashion says 2008 and not 2017?” Other than Serena’s hobo purses, most of what they wear would still be relevant today, almost a decade after the show was filmed.
That led me to think about the 2000’s. Society has a clear picture of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, but what styles defined the 2000’s? I started reading up on it extensibly – my entire high school and college careers were in the 2000’s, so this should all come flooding back to me. I’ll explain my findings in a different post, but the excitement I had while looking up “2000’s trucker hats” was it – I must explore this obsession with trends. And blogging about it was the best solution I could think of.
In 2008, I was a Senior, enrolled in Iowa State University’s Graphic Design program. During my last semester, I was required to take a course in Graphic Design History. One of the assignments in this class was to read The Great Gatsby.
Once the entire class had read the book, we engaged in a classroom discussion on the icons in the book, and how each object had meaning. The light across the water wasn’t just a light – it was a beacon, calling out for Daisy to find her long lost lover.
We also dissected the 20’s – flapper style, and how it came to be. This was a turning point for me, in how I thought about everything. All elements that define our lives are a collage of the times – what we wear, where we live, what we eat. Also, how our interiors look, our hairstyles, how we take our coffee, where we vacation, what we’re named, how we name our kids – these “trends” are all influencers and are all brought on by influence, like scalloped potatoes – overlapping and being overlapped simultaneously, a mosh posh of influence. (We were about to eat Thanksgiving dinner when I first wrote this, hence the scalloped potatoes reference.)
Trends wouldn’t exist without Group Think, and that Group Think spreads like a disease (a happy disease, in most cases), often beginning on the coasts of the US and moving inward. And you can tell when you’re about to get infected. It might start with your favorite social media celebrity, pushing their new favorite makeup brand. Then slowly, your friends start talking about it, and before you know it, you’re ordering Glossier’s Boy Brow and penciling in your brows to get that fierce caterpillar look.
Throughout the life of this blog, I hope to explore everything related to trends (so, everything there is), not just for the sake of being trendy, but more like a grad student’s dissertation – understanding what they are, when they were prominent, how they were popular and why they became popular. And if you’re thinking, what does this have to do with designing food labels? My answer: everything. I’ll get to that at some point…
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