En quête d’une tendance de mode dans un bureau de style parisien

Upstream of the production chain, the « trend forecasting offices » intend to anticipate, to detect and to analyze what will be next season. Two years in advance, they develop a "trend book" which announces according to various themes: the concepts, the images, the colors and the fabrics. If a trend forecasting office is on the quest of a fashion trend, how does it affect its daily life and its actors? And vice versa, how do they make this trend book? My ethnographic study reveals behind the scenes of making a trend book by following the research practices of the iconographic team in a Parisian trend forecasting office. This object is built on a routine constantly reactivated by various hierarchical and institutional deadlines. Their daily life of these actors is punctuated by ephemeral events imposed by the cycle of fashion, it shows the capacity of this place to metamorphosed itself. Then begins a play between the scenes and the backstage, in the sense given by Erving Goffman, which encourages perpetual redevelopment of their activities and their places. The concept of the upcoming season is gradually brought to life from a repetitive, selective and colossal experimental research of the iconographic material that promotes the incorporation of “knowledge to see” by educating the eyes of these actors associated with a “knowledge to read” through a semiological reading of the image. Exposed during textile fairs, the trend book is transmitted to corporate customers without recognizing the collaborative work from which it comes, it’s this opaque dimension that wishes to highlight this article