Next big thing?
Trends that influence the kind of furniture we buy, the cars we drive and the cellphones we use begin with a wisp of an idea, a raw, inchoate feeling. They can begin in unlikely places, which is why Francoise Serralta of Paris, the research director for a global styling agency, was steadily pawing through vintage items at the flea market at Fairfax High School on a recent Sunday.
A picture of unstudied chic, Serralta is the head of a team of design sociologists on four continents who gather information for Peclers, the oldest and largest trend forecasting/styling agency in the world. The Paris-based company, founded in 1970, advises the architecture, fashion, consumer products and auto industries on lifestyle changes far over the horizon. About 1,500 clients worldwide, such as Mattel, Mitsubishi and Lancome, depend on Serralta and the company’s 86 other far-flung employees to give them a road map of the future.
At Fairfax, she was fixated on the collar details of thin retro sweaters. “Finishing is important,” she says, intently examining the double collar of a coral short-sleeved sweater from the 1940s. She studies a black leather jacket covered with black embroidery. “The monochromatic effect has richness,” is her verdict. She swoops in on a wraparound skirt made of old ties. “I don’t care about the skirt,” she declares. “I’m interested in the mix of prints.”
It turns out that Serralta is rarely interested in an item for its own sake. She will snap up a jacket for its lining or zero in on a blouse made of grosgrain ribbons but announce that it must be dyed another color. “Everything must be rerouted and reinterpreted,” she explains. “I found a nice shoe in the flea market on Sixth Avenue in New York recently, but I’m not going to use it as a shoe but as a print. I try to find the significant little detail.”
All her purchases will be reworked in Paris, then sorted into design families, which will be analyzed, photographed and described in the dozens of lavishly illustrated trend books that Peclers publishes each year. These books, which can cost as much as $2,680 a copy, have titles such as “Color & Confirmation,” “Prints & Patterns” and “Living.” They are marvels of printing technology, with three-dimensional fabric swatches, paint chips, buttons, floor coverings and items from nature attached to the pages. Currently, the company is working on what will be hot in 2006. That book will be released in July of this year.
Serralta, who has worked for Peclers for more than 30 years, is petite, intense and always on the lookout for the next big things. On this trip, she gave a series of lectures on color and design at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and spent her spare time darting to fashion-forward shops and restaurants.
Peclers’ representatives from France visit Los Angeles annually. When they come, they rely on the company’s Los Angeles-based agent, Sarah Brady, to organize an itinerary of kinda now, kinda wow stops in the city. Serralta, who has visited several times, was taken to of-the-moment restaurants (Opaline, A.O.C. and R23), saw the Walt Disney Concert Hall, made the requisite foray to Fred Segal, took in various new boutiques in Silver Lake and more plebeian outposts such as Target, where the Parisian was fascinated with the cosmetics department. “It had more excitement and funny products than the rest of the store.”
In every field of consumption, she says, we are experiencing the same huge currents. There’s the trend of making everyday items, such as cellphones, more fashionable. (Peclers works a lot with cellphone companies.) Electrical appliances are becoming one with the human body, she observes. You see cellphones as necklaces.
Talking to the students at the fashion institute, Serralta gave a dizzying overview of life in the future, with crosscurrents among furniture, cosmetics, living arrangements and leisure activities. Her speeches were studded with provocative phrases, such as “subversive simplicity” and “puzzle living,” and she linked such disparate elements as the Japanese trend of kawai (“cute” design) into adding more emotion to shopping malls by piping in the sounds of birds.
She predicted that recycled materials will become commonplace in home furnishings but will lose their dull colors, illustrating her point with a photograph of a sofa in eye-popping colors made from cheap plastic shopping bags. Pop-ups are not only on our computer screens, she said, but represent the concept of instantaneous, convertible living spaces. Restaurants, shops and offices will include inflatable bubbles where we will adjourn for massages or short anti-stress retreats.
The world of late-night clubbing, where dreamlike environments are created, will be an increasing influence on home and hotel design. We’ll see casual glitter with unexpected flashes of jewels (symbolizing meteorite twinkles) on everyday items from luggage to cars.
Old factories, with their industrial retro chic, also will play a part in the furnishings in our future, she predicted. As more and more work is done in cyberspace, Serralta sees nostalgia for the Industrial Revolution, when tangible products were actually made. There will be a fascination with old machinery as furniture and former factories as housing sites, with early computers becoming artwork.
Also as a revolt from computer-like predictability, the imperfections of the human hand are now considered a very big design advantage. Fabrics and furniture increasingly will be treated like blank canvases, allowing designers or consumers to scribble on them. Embroidery will resemble writing. Motifs and illustrations will be applied more at random than with orderly perfection.
In cosmetics, this means selling powders or lipsticks that deliberately crack or appear as dripping wax or piles of shavings instead of a clean graphic line, Serralta told the students. Beauty powders will be presented as rough-textured, handmade products. More and more cosmetics stores will allow customers to mix and package their own colors, instead of buying beautifully wrapped but identical purchases. “We will visit stores for the experience, and consuming will be second.”
Serralta said that despite her travels and efforts to stay on top of trends in fields as varied as biology and Third World philanthropy, her work and that of her company are rarely recognized publicly. “When something works for our clients, they never say thanks to Peclers. We are always in the shadows.”
