#9: Meet the woman who will tell you what you're going to wear next year.
The Office Hours Interview: Ayesha A. Siddiqi
Ayesha A. Siddiqi is a trend forecaster and writer splitting time between London and LA. She's worked on major campaigns for major brands and a lot of NDA-clad projects that affect things you use every single day. Her Twitter is worth your time, as she will predict fashion trends and color themes every so often. Now, throwing random shit out on Twitter isn’t a real value prop, but Ayesha shows her work. An example:
She posted this tweet in April 2017:
and then this one right after:
In January 2018 she made a thread tracking all the spring/summer 2018 fashions featuring the exact colors she tweeted would become popular a year before followed by examples backing up her prediction from several big-name designers from all over the world.
Look through the thread in that second tweet. The sheer diversity of the designers who invoked the color scheme she called way in advance feels almost impossible to coordinate. She’s done multiple times at random over the years and has a dedicated Twitter following that sends her pics and look books from all over the world confirming her forecasting.
Based on my (admittedly limited) work in the space, I believe the best trend forecasters are essentially for-profit cultural anthropologists. The best ones use historical data to inform trends as well as societal data both qualitative and quantitative (the more they have of the latter, the better in my opinion). Ayesha is the perfect storm. Folks like her influence the influencers. I am beyond excited that she took the time to speak with me. Meet the woman who will tell you what clothes you're going to wear next year.
You've said a few times now in articles and on Twitter that we're living in "Bush-era redux". For those of us who aren't hip, what does that mean going into 2019?
More war, more violence, more denial and suppression of those realities by the ruling class of the United States, and subsequently more aesthetic trends formed by that suppression escaping in visual motifs, clues to the global mood.
Fashion isn't able to be separated by politics, it seems. The red hat, the yellow vests, the blue wave. Why can't we shake our primary colors?
The return of the primary color palette to high fashion is a response to the recent past of desert hues, earth tones, all the muted shades that seem not just passe but clueless now. Bright colors aren't always infantile, they're how animals signal to each other.
Speaking of shades...without giving up the secret sauce...can you give us one color to look for in 2019?
Hunter Green.
The floor is yours. Share one fact you think Office Hours readers might not know.
The US has 800 military bases around the world. Russia, the UK, and France have 30 foreign bases. Combined.
Got anything to promote?
Check out https://theoneswelove.shop/
Where can readers find your work?
They can find me in LA and London, my byline is Ayesha A. Siddiqi and im online @AyeshaASiddiqi
YOUR HOMEWORK FOR THE WEEKEND:
Archiving the 20Teens With Ayesha A. Siddiqi
"Florida is to the Trump Era what California was to the Bush era. We’re living in Bush era redux...This is American Gulf Futurism, drawn from Floridian motorcross and NASCAR, Cape Canaveral’s NASA, and Disney."
I absolutely adore the work SSENSE does in the fashion space. (If anyone knows someone over there, link me?)
They’re doing such interesting work when it comes to covering fashion. They tapped Ayesha to provide a retrospective of the last decade with direct links to clothes and what those clothes mean to the people who wear them. What they signify, how they communicate class and personality. Left brain thinking about right brain concepts, reporting on what you’re seeing now and offering answers to that oh-so-critical “why are people wearing _____” questions. This is A++++ trend reporting.
OFFICE HOURS has a free podcast available on ITunes, Spotify and everywhere you listen to podcasts. The content in that podcast will be different than the newsletter, in order to give you beautiful subscribers exclusive stuff. It’s all an experiment
New episodes every week, tell a friend.
TUNES:
Q1 2019 —
Everything I loved or discovered that dropped between Jan - Mar 2019. Lasts about an hour, give it a go while you’re doing a mindless task or chorin’.