ohhh but I am good. question is when the 90s fashion revival really picked up steam - doc martens in 2009 yes, cropped t-shirts 2010 I think, and buffalo trainers are just starting to creep in over the last six months…

New fashion trends consultancy Editd is (finally) bringing big data, crowdsourcing and quantitative rigour to the hitherto very expert-driven world of fashion forecasting.

Pretty amused that this is in the same week I’m working on a pilot trend forecasting project at Face, seeing if social media buzz can be used to predict what’ll be the key looks at Glastonbury this weekend. Our monitoring tool Pulsar uses same range of social media datasources as Editd - Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, Tumblr and all the rest - bringing them all together on a bespoke dashboard designed for research rather than PR use.

But Editd are using a few extra datasources too - included the Top 20 most Liked garments on ASOS (and elsewhere?) to produce a really strong indicator of current trend buzz (this week: cut-outs). I wasn’t aware that ASOS had an API to pull this data from - and I’d love to know where they’re getting retailers’ sales figures for individual items too - but this mash-up of datasources is the future of business intelligence and it would be the future of market research, except it’s pretty clear this won’t be happening in market research companies per se.

Having these different stages of purchase intent - from general social media buzz, to what people have been browsing and Liking, to actual sales figures - should allow it to be a very powerful prediction tool, capturing different stages of the decision-making process to probably do some pretty prescient stuff.

With a bit of expert curation on top, Editd looks really exciting - follow at @EDITDtweets to see what’s next.

That said, ASOS have half this stuff in-house already: at least all the Likes and all the purchase data, and I’d be very surprised if they’re behind on the social media monitoring… Wonder what we’ll see develop there too?

With the sales starting, it’s time to think about what we’ll be wearing for autumn/winter 2010. Much as it might make sense to hold off on these trends until September, the eye starts to ache for something fresh a little sooner…

So first, what’s on the catwalks?

• Midi skirts just below the knee (narrow at Celine, A-line at Prada)…
• …meaning that heels will need to be mid-height courts for the sake of non-stumpy legs.
• The camel coat
• Grown-up, restrained but not quite as sharp as minimal. Phoebe Philo at Celine is still the crucial mood-setter.
• Black, camel/tan browns, and a bit of khaki if we’re continuing the current military look that’s really more utility than ceremonial military bling
• Furry boots at Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana
• Something a bit Seventies at Balmain obviously, and in some of the patterned knitwear and sheepskin coats
• Mad Men Fifties/early Sixties at Louis Vuitton and Prada
• Otherwise mid-Nineties…
• …especially in the return to the trouser. Which, after several years of peg-legs, jodphurs, hareems and other loose-hips-narrow-ankle shapes, is now inverting the silhouette back to the flare.
• Mohair, velvet

BORING!

What the fuck am I going to wear? I’ve spent a couple of years weaning myself off black onto gray, with a vision of Alexander Wang sportswear in mind for a lot of outfits. This isn’t going to work this autumn. What might? Something minimal and austere, shift dresses, long-ish tight-ish skirts, and shirts and tailoring from Cos, the high street Calvin Klein.

Hmph. I’m not excited. Good for my bank balance, less good for feeling fabulous. Perhaps this all begs the question, why follow fashion at all? Why pay attention to this crazy circus of whim and trend and the senseless new, all intended to make us dissatisfied with what we already have and buy buy buy?

But I like new - new ideas, new inspirations, new shapes, not necessarily new items. I’m interested in fashion - and catwalk rather more than high street - out of an interest in keeping my style modern. Fresh. Getting stuck in a style rut would seem to close down the possibilities of creativity and self-creation that clothing can offer, and I wouldn’t want my image (my self-image, my imagined self, my self) to ever stop transforming. Fashion offers a parade of new ideas that each season may at first seem ugly, strange or dull. What interests me is how your eye learns to make sense of these new shapes and colours, until you see something to steal.

This autumn, I think that is some notion of a uniform, of rigour. A discipline that is lean, rather than tipping over into the studded patent leather excesses of the rock’n’roll S&M look of autumn-winters’ passed. People are talking about classics, which makes me wary - these to me cannot be interesting, and take far too much of a risk in the direction of frumpiness or dull. I think I need something sharper, which is to say minimalism and sculptural shapes, with slightly off colour combinations a la Marni - burnt, acid tones, especially in makeup. Better make a lookbook - that to follow…

Meanwhile, American Vogue’s July issue offers the following:

“I AM WOMAN”:

I am not girl. I do not emulate the pop-burlesque fashion stylings of Ke$ha or Katy Perry. I do not aspire to PASSÉ MORNING-AFTER CHIC, with bird’s-nest hair and shredded leather leggings. No. Of Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck — and Lena Horne — I sing.

(Have you felt the smooth, snug tug of fine leather gloves being pulled on? Have you considered the REBELLION, the nonconformity, inherent today in a Marnie Eisenhower knit suit? Have you worn a crinoline lately?)

Reader, if you’re older than fourteen, fashion for fall 2010 offers more WEARABLE OPTIONS than it has in eons. Skirts fall below mid-thigh. Designers are giving us dead-cool-but-still-practical STREETWEAR UNIFORMS for work or school. Black-with-black is totally back.

Can we get an “Amen” up in here?

*raises eyebrow*

Apparently it’s a snide dig at US Elle which has been branding itself as a bit rock’n’roll lately. For a magazine advocating the New Grown Up, however, I couldn’t really call it dignified…