The six top trends to impact people and businesses were revealed during the second edition of NEXT: Design Perspectives.

You know when they say retail is dead and marketing is obsolete and you smell BS? Fashion is a business, complicated, polluted, but still millions of people count on it as their premiere source of income. I, on my side, count on it because I believe in what’s left of good in it. There’s a lot of bad, I know, we shall hide it all momentarily under the umbrella of fast fashion. For the purpose of this blurb, let’s analyze the work, research and development that lays behind what’s still considered the frivolous world of Fashion.

When we talk about Fashion month, we see the bad and the ugly, the excessive carbon footprint, brands following the footsteps of designers and copying what it had been proposed the season before, models too thin and body shaming, creative directors interpreting the heritage of the historical maisons too personal and dragging the customers in Pindaric flights to unknown destinations. We concentrate in what we see. We are already lucky enough to be exposed to what’s to come the next season, in Fashion time six months from now.

The work of researching trends and analyzing data that WGSN does every year starts 2 years before at the moment of pulling the data, and 1 year before what it comes to delivering the results of the research and announcing the new trends. Try to look at fashion, and design that way for a moment and you realize the enormous power that knowing why you see what in the windows or why all of a sudden corduroy or mint green show up everywhere. You’ll watch that “cerulean” and “stuff” statement of Amanda in The Devil Wears Prada with brand new eyes.

Anyways, some macro takeaways from the conference:

• inclusivity and diversity

• sustainability and new consumer habits: the end of “more” as we know it, overconsumption of disposable objects, it’s becoming a world of the experience, the desire, and an economy based on the immaterial, of quality versus quantity. Rental economy and resourceful essentials (second-hand, consignment)

• tech and digital craftsmanship: from linear to circular systems, where the end life of the item becomes it’s re-birth.

• generations face-off: the effects of an aging population on one side and the demands of a “population growing younger”.

• the home hub and the sense of self-care. Home becomes an almost sacred environment for self-care and improvement.

• “Made in Italy is a value: the third best known brand in the world” according to the President of ICE. “Design is at its heart. Design means creativity, manufacturing, and innovation.”

Now, going back to that stuff statement, do you recognize yourself in any of the above mentioned macro-trends for 2021?

I do, in all of them. Some big time, some I wish I would more, some are brand new to me, like my new obsession for decorating the house with plants and the joy of taking care of them, something totally and fully not me. But it’s never too late, right? Or is it that late that I am on next level nesting, when you talk to your plants? Because I have already adopted that practice with the pup.

How about that initial statement that retail is dead? You see how retail - as we have known it- and marketing based on the old fashion economic rule of make-buy-throw are the dead ones? We are at the brink of a revolution, feels very Suffragette of me, but like at the beginning of the 20th century the industrial revolution made its statement, at the beginning of the 21st century we are living through the digital revolution, everything changes, economy and communication.