Why strategists & marketers should think about fabric
I’ve made a habit over the past few years of following textile trends, not because I want to know what people will be wearing or how they’ll be decorating their houses, but because anyone with half a brain can decipher shifting cultural codes from the stuff we cover our bodies in. It doesn’t require a degree in textiles or fashion to realise that how people dress themselves and their homes is directly correlated to how they feel about the world around them.
Instead of laboriously scavenging through various textiles books, fabric shops, trend books, Style.com or religious reading of the Sartorialist (most of which I do, anyway when I have time), I also attend a twice-a-year go-to trends presentation by the incredible Li Edelkoort.
The former president of the design programme at Eindhoven, former Creative Director for Jil Sander, and venerable consultant to most major brands (most of whom deny following her advice as closely as they do), Li is pretty much as close as it comes to being a cultural dowsing rod.
While I’m as cynical as most when it comes to trend forecasting, believing that with enough influence, the industry leaders might be capable of producing virtually perfect self-fulfilling prophesies, Li continues to out-pace these assumptions. And I’m not just saying this because I also write for her magazine, Bloom, but because she has an incredible knack for pattern recognition and sensing the way people feel long before anyone has the nerve to express it.
Some call her a guru, which doesn’t really do her justice. If our job as strategists and culture makers is understand where cultural gaps are about to appear, Li’s job seems to be to clarify what might otherwise be a cluttered set of thoughts and random notions. She identifies, in the words of Shopenhauer, what everyone has seen but not yet noticed.
Your job, while sitting in her audience and afterward, is to think laterally. Let your imagination wander. What does it mean for the cultures of washing/driving/eating/love-making/communicating/drinking when we are obsessed with fossils? Or water? Or birds? It is not as simple as this, but when Li expands each topic by variations on a theme, suddenly the patterns will appear. You will notice influences, you will notice culture gaps, you will notice icebergs before the ship needs to turn. If nothing else, you will spend a few hours being inspired to think visually - a skill most strategists and planners could improve.
Most of Li’s presentations cost about £300, but on 25th of May she will present her 2011 work called ‘In Flight’ for £36, organised by the lovely folks at KMAUK. I highly recommend any students of planning, planners, strategists and creative directors-in-training to check it out…. TICKETS HERE
