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Forecasting

This morning while on the train Diane and I bumped into someone Diane used to work with 4 years ago. Claire, the ex-intern, explained that she just had a baby and was working for a company that provided “Trend Forecasting.”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=trend+forecasting&spell=1 The basic gist of _trend forecasting_ is people go out to fashionable parts of the city (places I don’t know about) and talk to trend setters (people who I’m not cool enough to know) they then sell the information (collected from the Über trendy) and sell it (to companies with money to burn).

I guess it’s honest money and everything, but something about it feels wrong.

Maybe it’s that nagging feeling that the “popular crowd” is really a load of twits who spend their lives looking for the next big thing to leech onto, instead of making any difference in the world. Or maybe it’s just me, wishing I was part of the über crowd and jealous of the lifestyle. Or maybe it’s the fascination I have, every time I walk past the Café in Union Square and see the elite models eating their sesame chicken salads making small talk so small they don’t use nouns.

All I know is today, when I went out to get my lunch, I saw a super-thin woman prancing out of “Diesel”:http://www.diesel.com/ and she was so thin that the skin on her jaw rippled as she walked by, sliding on her bony face.

I think she may have noticed my horrified look, I hope It didn’t make her go purge.

Forecasting the trends

4 replies on “Forecasting”

Man that whole crowd is bullshit. In the end they will be the ones who have regrets, they'll see that they lived for material. Nice blog Ben.

craziness.
you should read "the savage girl" by alex shakar. usually i don't hop around blogs recommending books, but i'm reading it as we speak and your post made me think of it. It's fiction, about trend researchers ("Tomorrow, Ltd."). The book is totally outrageous, but I can't even call it a parody since the world of trend forecasting is like its own bad joke.
It's insane how much money in this world goes into trying to get people to be unhappy with their lives so they'll buy more shit.

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