DeeDee Gordon

Politics and power. Business and bucks. Art and aesthetics. It used to be that politics, business and aesthetics were well-codified, each fitting tidily into its respective box. But somewhere around the time Andy Warhol introduced his Campbell’s soup can and Chairman Mao paintings, the distinction between culture, business and politics began to blur. As the three converged, and the world grew more complicated, decoding culture, once the milieu of academia, became big business--really big business. Sneaker companies became cultural and socioeconomic forces. Nike went from being a shoe manufacturer to an aspiration. Cool became a commodity. We are what we buy, and we all want to be like Mike.

“You can put two products in front of me, I can tell you which one is going to sell and which one is cool, and it may not be the same,” says DeeDee Gordon, creator and editor of the L Report, a youth-culture trend-tracking journal published by Del Mar-based advertising agency Lambesis. Employing and surveying the tastes of more than 1,800 young people worldwide, the L Report focuses on youths whom Gordon has identified as trendsetters, meaning those “who think outside of the box.” Though the client list is a secret, large companies that subscribe to the quarterly L Report pay $20,000 annually to learn what is “cool” to twentysomething trendsetters and how quickly that information will trickle down to mainstream youths across the nation. Gordon asserts that 14- to 24-year-old trendsetters drive change in our culture, influencing everything from the merchandise we encounter to the stylish ads used to sell it.

Gordon, 28, who grew up in Potomac, Md., says she herself “will always think outside the box.” She dropped out of college at age 20 to open a retail clothing store in Boston. Next, as a freelance consultant to Converse, she persuaded the company to launch the One Star sandal. Gordon recognized the “intrinsic cool” of the retro One Star sneaker and contemporized it in the form of a sandal. Its runaway success established her authority on consumer culture.

Unsatisfied with traditional market research she was given while at Converse, Gordon developed the L Report, with its emphasis on qualitative rather than quantitative data. Gordon, who in conversation speaks largely in the present tense, in a hybrid of surfer slang and adspeak, now lives in Los Angeles, when she is not traveling to speak at Fortune 500 companies and Ivy League universities.

Where other trend forecasters may make their prognostications by absorbing every bit of information the media have to offer, Gordon is a different breed known as a “coolhunter,” constantly searching at the street level for the “authentic” and discarding the “contrived” in her hunt for the next cool thing. For Gordon, if it has hit the mainstream media, it’s “over.” She studies everything, from arcades in Tokyo to small boutiques in Los Angeles, to sneaker stores in downtown Manhattan--and corporate America is taking notes.

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Question: How do you define who is a trendsetter and who is mainstream?

Answer: We have a list of 20 open-ended questions that we ask people to find out if they think “outside of the box”--if they look outside of their own backyard for information. It’s from what movies they watch, what magazines they read, who influences them.

Then there are “gray-area people” who teeter between the trendsetter and mainstream. These people are so important, because they are the messenger. They take an idea from the innovator, and they make it accessible for the mainstream kid to latch onto it. Like, before Madonna was Madonna, there were people who had to carry Madonna into the masses, to make her palatable to the masses.

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Q: Who is driving our consumer culture?

A: Nineteen- to 24-year-olds are the people who are the most influential. They’re the people you watch. They’re the people who start to covet certain products. They start making decisions at that time in their lives that are going to last them for their lifetime.

The 14- to 18-year-old kids look up to the 19- to 24-year-old kids to influence them in music, in style, in sports. They are the expert group. The 25- to 30-year-olds look down to them because they want to feel like they’re young and they’re hip and they’re in the know. That’s trickle up, trickle down.

An idea starts in one place and it can move up through age groups and it can move down through age groups. It can move from a male idea into a female idea, from city to city. L.A. was all about doing yoga and pilates, and that trickled across the country from 25- to 30-year-olds down to 19- to 24-year-olds in New York.

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Q: How does a trend start?

A: The search for the patient zero. There is that one kid who turns everybody else on to something. And that kid might get the idea out of the sky. I believe in the collective consciousness--they might pick up the energy from some place or they might end up getting the idea from history.

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Q: From history?

A: Well, they are seeing what things are happening right now, and they are looking through history and seeing people, like icons, that they are inspired by. And they say, “OK, cool, I think Jim Morrison, what he stood for, was really great. I’m going to maybe start dressing like him. Or I’m going to get into the bands that he was into.”. . .

They are looking through history and seeing things that make sense to them and then taking that and interpreting it into their own deal.

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Q: How do you know a trend is over?

A: You’ll know when people stop talking about it, when it will stop influencing fashion, when it will stop influencing what people do with their free time, what they’re spending their money on. Once you see enough of those ideas out in the marketplace that are similar, you know it’s over.

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Q: If once the idea has latched on, it’s over, then is it only a trend when it’s new?

A: It’s only going to be “trendy”--which is different. It’s only going to be trendy with trendsetters when not a lot of people have latched onto it. But it’s not going to be trendy with mainstream people. When something is trendy with mainstream people, that is what the marketers are looking for. You want a million and one people to latch onto your idea. But as a person who is innovating a new product, you need lead time. You’re not going to want to pay attention to the mainstream person; you’re going to want to pay attention to the trendsetter.

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Q: Once it is in the mainstream the clock is ticking?

A: It’s ticking the whole time.

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Q: Typically, how long does it take for trends to go from patient zero to being over?

A: It used to take a year and a half to two years for something to properly filter. But now things can take three to eight months, depending on what it is. Because communication is so fast, and it’s so easy to access information in places like the middle of the country, where you would think they would be the last people on Earth to ever get the thing, if they ever got it at all. They’re the third people to get it now.

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Q: You track specific cases from year to year. What’s this process?

A: We’ll go and hire kids--like, 10 kids per city around the world--and keep going back to those cities four times a year. We’ll ask them what they are spending their money on, and what kinds of things they are listening to, and what they are doing for entertainment in general. The information comes to us to determine how quickly things are changing in different cities. Also, how quickly the taste is elevating, because we’ve seen a real elevation in taste.

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Q: What do you mean by taste elevating?

A: Remember back when you would go get mustard and all you could buy was yellow mustard? Now, you’ve got all these different mustards to choose from. Well, we thought that was just for older markets, but it’s the same way with the youths. They are definitely looking for a higher quality, not just in foods, but in clothing and all types of products, even in entertainment.

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Q: And if the tastes are elevating, are they all elevating to the same place?

A: Most of them are. There is a plateau that they get to. Because of the way that communication is nowadays, things have become so universal. What seems to be the best way to dress, the best types of cars to drive and the “in music” to listen to and equipment you should be using has all become pretty universal.

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Q: So a trendsetter kid in Japan has more in common with a trendsetter kid in New York than with a mainstream Japanese kid.

A: Right.

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Q: How important is L.A. to trends?

A: We see so many trends come out of L.A. because this is where the entertainment industry is. Many celebrities gravitate to L.A. to live for at least half of the year; a lot of the media comes from them. They pick it up here and then it filters out to the rest of the country--everything from lifestyle trends, whether it be from a spiritual standpoint, from a sports standpoint. Like, yoga, pilates, spinning, skating all came from L.A. and kind of moved across country. Also the holistic stuff, spirituality, being in touch with the mind, body and soul.

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Q: You track “top-of-mind awareness,” meaning the very first thing these kids think of. What is a “top-of-mind” theme right now?

A: Millennium fever, which I know I am sick and tired of talking and hearing about, is something that is top of mind for most people. Fear of the unknown, fear of the millennium, fear of the Y2K thing. Are we going to have money; are we going to have food to eat?

Spirituality is also a theme. You’ve got a lot of people in the public eye who are getting into certain types of spirituality such as cabala and Buddhism, everybody from the Beastie Boys to Madonna. And when kids see their idols getting into something, they want to get into it, too.

Or eco-chic is a great theme, where people are buying things that are made of recyclable and biodegradable materials. They are wearing natural fibers, things that aren’t dyed with hazardous dyes, things that are more comfortable, more unconstructed. They are eating foods that are more comfort-based or holistic, like healthy foods, natural foods, organic foods. They’re learning how to garden.

I could go on and on and on. But you see it in all areas and all age groups. And that is when you say, “Yes, this is a trend.” It’s not just one thing.

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Q: Earlier, you said people always come back to the same brands. Can you give me an example?

A: You will almost always come back to the same brand if you have trust in a brand growing up. It’s always been something that’s been good quality, never lets you down. It’s a good price. You almost always go back there. It’s like a comfort zone; it’s like a safety belt. It’s a trust. People look for something to define who they are, that one thing that is going to define them and be kind of the mascot for their life.

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Q: At what age does someone commit to a brand for life?

A: As soon as they start making these decisions and purchases with their own money, because then there is a greater chance that they will come back. It’s like when you’re sick: You always want to go home. And you want to have that same food you had that your mother would make you.

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Q: Of all the kids, are the Americans still the most influential?

A: No, I get the most out of the Japanese kids and the kids from London. They are more forward in their thinking, meaning that the Japanese kids have more access to new products and new ideas and new concepts. Just go into their arcades. They were into all of the virtual games years before we were. Their eyes are trained to see things in a much different way. They are more in tune to things that are new and innovative. For us, it takes a while for people to catch on and say, “Hey, it’s OK. Look how cool this is; look, it works.” Look at DVD. Look at the minidisc, which really hasn’t taken off here. They have been doing that minidisc forever. London is more fashion and music.

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Q: What do you think we are inventing here?

A: I think it’s lifestyle. I think that we are about lifestyle, and I think that that’s something no one else can mimic, like the freedom to be able to do so many different things and be so many different things and create as much as you want. It’s that attitude. And I haven’t found any other culture that can be so immersed in so many different things the way we are and have that type of freedom.