I’ve had a love affair with Fashion for close to seven decades. My mom and grandmother were both seamstresses and I always had heaps of scraps to play with as I dressed my dolls and created wardrobes by pasting shapes on cardboard—pinning before Pinterest? Learning to actually sew, instead of gluing, seams was a huge step forward.
Like some of the others have mentioned, inspiration and ideas came from everywhere—watching, reading, dreaming—and I loved the process of turning something in my head into something I could show others. What I actually put on my body, though, was an entirely different matter. Until I was in my late forties, my wardrobe had to be practical for reasons of budget and propriety. Trends really didn’t interest me as much as figuring out ways to put my own spin on my what felt good on my body and right for me to wear to do whatever needed to be done. I was often baffled when I saw others copying an idea, but figured it must be just because they had had a similar thought in their head.
After doing some hard thinking about this adjective thing, I’ve come down to thinking of my adjectives as Simple, Practical, and Interesting. Simple because I like working with silhouettes and lines (embellishments don’t much interest me); Practical because I like my clothes to last (shades of past experience with glued seams!) and I still believe in dressing to fit the occasion, setting, and climate (properly designed gear is as delightful to wear as designer fashion in my books!); and, finally Interesting which is where I put the fashion fun into play.
Trends, therefore, aren’t easy to figure out. On one hand, I’m obviously interested and inspired by what I see around me, but that interest and inspiration needs to be filtered through my internal lens before it makes its way onto my body. For example, deconstruction as an artistic statement interests me, but I’d never be caught dead in a deliberately destroyed garment. My deconstruction would be more about juxtaposing different fabrics and seaming techniques to create something I’d find interesting to wear—or even take a pair of scissors to a new garment to alter and redesign the garment to match my thought. Fashion advice about trends, datedness, what’s in and out, and “what not to do” similarly goes through my filter with most of it ignored until something hits my interest button. The recent discussion about purple puffers is a good example. I find it beyond ludicrous for someone to declare a color “out of fashion” (I mean, how can anyone summarily dismiss hundreds of tints, shades, and values on the color spectrum!) so I put the comment down to marketing hyperbole—but the concept of how color and seaming might used to create a design feature tweaks my interest.
I probably haven’t answered your question properly, so I apologize for that. But maybe there are others on this forum who think about trends as pulsars of light instead of directives?
