All day long, Sally Lohan looks for signposts that would be easy to miss in the constant onslaught of visual information that comes your way on a typical Los Angeles street.
Sally Lohan of the trend analysis firm Worth Global Style Network
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On a recent Wednesday, her first stop is the street art in the alley behind the Melrose strip. She points to the painted brick walls and uses terms such as "controlled color explosion" in a British accent that's a perfect mix of authoritative and adorable.
Lohan is a trend forecaster who tries to figure out where fashion is headed. So why is she looking at street art? She's not looking at fashion as measured by hemlines but fashion writ large: cultural trends, where people's heads are at, what they care about.
"We're seeing animals, trees, references to the environment, sustainability," Lohan says, studying one mural. "People obviously being concerned about that. It's uppermost in people's minds. It's not dark. It's optimistic."
Lohan runs a think tank at WGSN, which stands for Worth Global Style Network, a trend analysis and research firm with offices across the globe. Her job is not to make magazine cover–style predictions like "Feathers are hot for spring!" but to team with researchers in other regions to locate "macro trends" that will trickle down into what people are doing, wearing and buying.
A "macro trend" is something huge, like the upcoming "eco hedonism," which means incorporating sustainability into luxury goods. Or "radical neutrality," a new take on minimalism, which Lohan defines as "taking information away in order to express new ideas." In fashion, that might translate to dressing all in one color.
On a typical day in the field, Lohan will go somewhere like the Rose Bowl Swap Meet, or Coachella. She'll take maybe 400 pictures. Of those, she'll single out perhaps two or three people wearing something that interests her.
These connected dots wind up on a report or photo essay on WGSN.com, which then is accessed by execs, buyers, marketers or even designers for the firm's big-name clients, such as Target, Levi's and Adidas.
So is fashion top-down, or bottom-up? Do the designers tell people what to wear, or do people on the street tell the designers what to create?
Both, actually. Lofty designers used to tell people what to wear, but ideas now flow in all directions — from the street up, from bloggers in one corner of the world to readers in another, from designers to consumers. It's a huge feedback loop that encompasses past, present, insiders, outsiders. A fashionista may see the modern potential in a "dated" piece, and remix it with something current — pairing a vintage '60s shift dress with an '80s neon jacket, or giving swing-dance wear a goth twist. She isn't necessarily designing clothing from scratch, but she's creating memes designers can notice and integrate into their work.
There's a cynical view of fashion, the one that says hemlines go up and down just to keep you buying, buying, buying, to keep you living in fear of being unstylish. That designers do nothing but recycle looks from a few years ago again and again.
Lohan sees clothing designers as artists who are constantly trying to reinvent history with creativity and beauty while working within the constraints of the body, fabrics and movement. We could reject the fashion industry if we choose, and all wear the same uniform, year in and year out; many do. But Lohan finds it more fun to see fashion as the world's biggest game of mix-and-match — color, style, line, flow, past, present.
The next stop on her route is a crucial resource: an upscale La Brea vintage shop called The Way We Wore. Vintage clothing is tremendously important to Lohan, as sometimes designers will take just one single element or detail from a photo of a vintage piece Lohan provides and base an entire collection on that theme.
The shop has two halves. The door on the left leads to a lovely boutique where stylish, garrulous clerks with an impressively in-depth understanding of clothing greet Lohan warmly and offer her a Perrier. The prices aren't ohmygodareyouhighondrugs high but about what you'd expect for a shop so exquisitely curated. There are things here a commoner might purchase, but it's also the place to go if you need to find a vintage dress to wear to the Oscars.
The door on the right leads to something that looks at first glance like the more typical thrift-shop jumble — heaps and heaps of clothes, necklaces, bags. But spend a few minutes, and the method behind the madness soon comes into focus. Clothes are organized by era, style or fabric. There are ruffly clothes from the 1920s. A samurai helmet hangs in the front window, underneath a sailor suit. In the back, handbags are organized by type: whimsical, animal, detailed, embroidered, textured. It's like a physical reference library of fashion history, and designer clients can call the store to ask the shop clerks–cum–librarians to help them with research. One client has asked the shop to pull a selection of Pucci and Pucci-esque prints. A collection of dresses — one that has a faux-Japanese style, one with Native American motifs — stands on a rack in a backroom, waiting for his perusal.
