Ómós Digest #58: Trending.
What drives food, fashion and design trends?
I have always had an appreciation for design. A favourite pastime of mine as a child was walking through the neighbourhoods that surrounded our home with my parents following dinner, picking which house and gardens we liked best (or hated most). Houses with UPVC windows never ranked highly, while anything with the colour ‘duck egg blue’ was rewarded. I think this is where, at 10, I came to understand the terms ‘Celtic Tiger’ and ‘notions’, which my mother would typically say as we passed a garden with topiary of any kind. As soon as one house had acquired a tapered hedge, within a matter of weeks, another house would follow suit and in time, a large majority of the neighbourhood was awash with cylindrical shaped gardens, more suited to Gerrards Cross than Dublin 6.
I find the concept of trends to be fascinating. Understanding the reason why people gravitate towards something over another is profoundly interesting, to the extent that I often ask myself what are the defining reasons that cause us to appreciate or follow a movement, or indeed, go the complete opposite direction. Is it because it is new, different or plain and simply good? The term “trend” can be applied to many things (such as data analytics, economics, social media, etc.), but in this case we’re understanding it to mean “an inclination towards style”, be that in fashion, design, entertainment, culture or indeed food. It’s whatever’s happening at a given time, and can be broadly connected to popularity and exposure.