This is a trend that won’t go away. From the 1960s to the ‘80s, American toys like Barbie, My Little Pony and Care Bears transformed the colour palette of the young wardrobe. During the 1990s, when many international brands opened their first branches in Japan, Harajuku-style fashions were adopted by Europeans, and designers like Servane […]
You may think we’re obsessed with green, but acid pea-shoot (as seen in the photomontage above) is just one of thirteen colour trends featured in the latest issue of our magazine. We’ve noticed that more and more men are wearing hats. Some of the more mainstream styles have been given a makeover – baseball caps […]
Craft workers and product designers are rapidly becoming the new elite of the art world. Master craftspeople, working with basic materials like wood, natural resin, wax, stone, metal, glass, leather, wool, paper or clay, create practical objects, as opposed to functionless art. Practicality and ease of manufacture is seen to outweigh the need for refined […]
Adults have become frozen in time, wishing to remain childlike for as long as possible. Women are putting off having children until later in life, if at all. Playful pets have become substitute children for many. Dogs have become a part of the family – people may share their bed with their dog, feed them […]
Oscar Medley-Whitfield creates pottery from Thames mud. Based beside the river in SE1, he calls his creations Wharfeware. There are many problems associated with using mud rather than clay. The drying out and tempering process makes the mud crack and it can’t be modelled and manipulated like clay. Oscar has created his own casting process, […]
As climate chaos becomes a more regular feature of our lives, designers will increasingly employ icy effects and frosty finishes in their work. The candle holder above, made from natural rock crystal, will come in handy during power outages caused by freak storm conditions. The glittery, paillette-covered bag by Mawi will cast sparkles of light onto snow […]
Peter Breugel’s Hunters In The Snow, painted around 1565, depicts people skating on frozen lakes at a time that is thought to mark the onset of the Little Ice Age. The River Thames froze on numerous occasions during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The frosty monarch had her own reputation for being an Ice […]
Pearls have fascinated for centuries and the popularity of the exhibition at the V&A reflects the universality of their appeal. Pearls are the inspiration for one of our product trends for Autumn/Winter 2014-15. In Elizabethan times, pearls were both a symbol of virginity and of fertility. The latest pearl embellished products capture this curious dichotomy […]
The celebrity bubble will burst when extreme poverty forces people to realise that shopping is not a religion and celebrities are not gods. Social classes will become unable to communicate with each other. A disenfranchised underclass will rise up against the growing international and celebrity elite it seeks to emulate. The coming revolution will see people […]
The video below shows a small snippet from our latest presentation. A previous Curious Trends report highlighted some of the bee and honeycomb inspired product designs spotted during 2011. Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen collection for Spring/Summer 2013 also reflected the beekeeping theme. Bees and honeycomb designs were common features of Elizabethan embroidery. They are now appearing […]