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Conference in Rotterdam

The History and Future of Fashion Prediction: University meets Industry

The Erasmus team, consisting of Principal Investigator Ben Wubs and Postdoctoral Fellow Thierry Maillet, organised this one-day public conference in collaboration with the Leeds team.

Taking place on 17 October 2014 at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, this event broke new ground. We believe it was the world’s first interdisciplinary conference to bring together academics, archivists, curators and fashion professionals to explore the history and practice of fashion forecasting, an important but understudied facet of the fashion business.

Trend forecasting and colour forecasting have shaped the seasonal collections of the global fashion industry since the interwar years, but the business of fashion prediction is invisible to the public and little-understood within fashion studies. Three members of the EOC team—Dr Thierry Maillet, Dr Véronique Pouillard-Maliks and Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk—are among the few scholars who have written about this subject. Building on this research, the Rotterdam conference assembled fashion history researchers and international trend forecasters and opened the floor to debate.

This conference was a one-day event with thirteen papers and a roundtable, which together examined the evolution of fashion prediction from the 1920s to the 2010s. Over time, the practice of fashion prediction has been exercised in different ways by different types of institutions, including consulting companies, trade associations, dedicated spaces at trade fairs, department stores, special divisions in major companies and, more recently, by bloggers and internet trendsetting companies.

Presentations explored how fashion prediction changed over time, with historians providing insight into why certain practices developed at certain moments and forecasters explaining contemporary methods. The conference was global in scope but, because of the venue, the Dutch experience was compared internationally and examined using theories of the fashion ecosystem.

Distinguished speakers included:

  • Fashion forecaster Nelly Rodi, founder of the NR Agency in Paris;
  • Professor Francesca Golfetto of Bocconi University in Milan and Dr. Diego Rinallo from the Kedge Business School in Marseille, co-authors of Trade Shows in the Globalizing Knowledge Economy;
  • Forecaster Ornella Bignami, founder of Elementi Moda in Milan;
  • Fashion curator Ninke Bloemberg from the Centraal Museum in Utrecht;
  • Archivist Karen Trivette Cannell from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York;
  • Mariette Hoitink, founder of the House of Denim in Amsterdam;
  • Roger Gerards, creative director at Vlisco Netherlands;
  • Graduate student Tets Kimura from Flinders University in Australia;
  • Professor David Zajtmann and Professor Dominique Jacoment from the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris;
  • Cher Potter of the V&A in London, formerly of WGSN, the Worth Global Style Network.

EOC team members also presented research papers and chaired sessions. Full information about all the speakers taking part can be found here.

The Rotterdam conference attracted 120 participants including students, fashion professionals, academics, curators, online marketers and journalists. Erasmus students were a large presence; leaders from the New Fashion Society, a student society dedicated to fashion studies, helped to organise the event, publicised it on the web, and wrote a conference report for the EOC website.

The audience questionnaires show that seventy percent of the participants judged the conference as a positive learning experience. A few remarks captured the spirit of the event: ‘It was a positive experience as I learned a lot of things I did not know and found out about some companies that really interest me’; ‘I learned new information on the textile industry with which I work’; and most important, ‘Cooperation between industry and school = the future’.

The event was funded by HERA II, in addition to supplementary funds from the Board of Erasmus University, Erasmus Trustfonds, the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, and the Posthumus Institute.

Photograph by Dennis Wisse