Trends are already over by the time you read about them. What’s of interest is the process of trends spreading from the margins into the middle of ordinary life. What you’re looking at is the shell on the beach. The trend itself was the wave, and it broke while you were doing something else.
This sounds like a provocation, but it’s more of a timing problem. Nearly all the structural work that makes something a trend happens in a window of roughly eighteen months. Researchers who study diffusion patterns call it the tipping corridor. So, if you understand what happens in those eighteen months, you will never be fooled again by the phrase ‘emerging trend’.
The First Six Months: The Thing With No Name
The behaviour is already happening before the corridor opens. A number of people within a similar demographic are behaving in a new way – buying, eating, spending differently – but there is as yet no name to describe the behaviour so it has no power. Nameless things cannot be sold, written about or announced in a press release.
The first stage of the corridor, therefore, is not adoption. It's naming. This can be the work of a journalist who coins a phrase. It could be the naming by a brand's marketing department. Or it could bubble up through social media into a caption that sticks. At this point the behaviour crystallises. The people already behaving in this way gain an identity as 'the' cottage-core person, the de-influencer, the quiet luxury shopper. But crucially, the people not yet doing it gain a destination.
The Middle Six Months: Retailers Climb Aboard a Moving Train
The naming of this behaviour is where it gets a bit grotesque and also fascinating. Retail buyers and brand strategists recognise this “signal” as they have spent their careers pattern-matching. They don't create the trend, they commodify it, which is different.
Product lines appear. Magazines run features. What was organic, often driven by genuine need or genuine taste, gets packaged back and sold to the people who were already doing it, usually at a slight premium and with considerably better branding than the original version. This is the moment when the corridor is fullest. Everyone credible in the supply chain is scrambling to catch the train from the platform.
The Last Six Months: The Backlash That Confirms Everything
Most people misread the backlash. The think pieces, podcasts and social media posts declaring a trend ‘ruined’ by corporates and over, are not evidence that it is dying. They are evidence that it has arrived. The backlash from early adopters is proof of success – as mainstream arrival always generates a resistance reaction from the people who were there first.
By the time the backlash reaches full volume, a trend has simultaneously been named, sold and packaged, covered by national media and rejected by the early adopters who gave it its original energy. The corridor is now closed. What remains is not a trend but a category, a permanent fixture in the cultural furniture, blandly available, no longer interesting to anyone who tracks these things.
You Are Always Standing in the Aftermath
The uncomfortable implication is this: everything you currently understand to be a trend is already finished in the sense that matters. The creative window has already shut. The naming moment has already gone and retailers are now restocking their shelves with the next round. What you're seeing is the mass-market echo, the behaviour made available at scale, stable and reliable and slightly unexciting.
And no, it's not depressing so much as clarifying. Spotting "the next thing" is relatively simple: it's the behaviour nobody has named yet, something that people are quietly doing already, without any branding around it, no feature in a weekend supplement, no product range to support it. That's the corridor, two years before it opens.
The named trend you read about this morning? The interesting version of that story is already eighteen months in the past, living in a flat somewhere, unnamed and genuinely odd, waiting for a journalist to give it a label and start the whole machine running again.
FAQ
What is the tipping corridor?
Researchers studying diffusion processes have labelled this phase the tipping corridor. It lasts for about 18 months and comprises the major structural changes that ultimately make a certain behaviour a trend. First of all, a name is given to a behaviour, then it is taken up by retailers, and finally there is a backlash to the trend, after which the trend becomes a fixed category.
Why does a behaviour need a name before it becomes a trend?
Until something is given a name it cannot be sold in shops, written about or announced in press releases. Who names things? Journalists, the marketing departments of brands or individuals posting on social media. By naming things those who are already doing them are given a label by which they can be known, and newcomers are given a place to go.
Does a backlash mean a trend is dying?
No. The backlash against a trend is a sign it has reached the mainstream. Early followers of a trend can become hostile once it reaches the mainstream and is thus adopted by corporations, so think pieces declaring it ruined show success rather than decline. By that point, however, the trend has already been named by journalists, sold by marketers and covered by national media.
How can you spot the next trend before it is named?
Often trends are already happening quietly among early adopters, with no name or branding, roughly two years ahead. When these start to appear in weekend supplements and as product ranges in shops, it’s already late. The mainstream and the machine get going once a journalist or brand gives them a name.
