In episode 1 of American Ivy, Avery discusses how companies like WGSN predict fashion trends in an increasingly trend-filled modern landscape. She then talks about the origins and evolution of the fashion style called American Ivy. She touches on what it means to be a trend and how they come about.  

“An outfit is a sentence that says This is what I am doing today, this is what the weather is, this is who I am (American Ivy 00:23:50-00:23:57).”

“ Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously- That’s what its like if youre wearing a fireman’s jacket and a feather boa. You can wear clothes but sometimes they dont make sense together (American Ivy 00:25:10-00:25:19).“

Questions

Research Question 1: Do forecasting companies truly predict trends or do they create them?

Research Question 2: Has the Ivy style shifted away from being a rich look?

Research Question 3: What clothing will be popular in the future?

Research Question 4:Is using WGSN something everyone is doing?

Claims

Claim 1: Clothing has to be coherent and make sense, like a sentence.

Claim 2: The desire to both stand out and fit in is what creates trends.

Claim 3: Clothing nowadays is more about the overall feeling they give, not the individual articles of clothing. 

Claim 4 (Preliminary Thesis): American Ivy is the style everyone will be wearing in the future

I still don’t understand what the American Ivy style is. On one hand, there is a lengthy segment in which Rachel describes how the style is less about the individual pieces of clothing, but about the layering of the pieces. However on the substack post, Avery describes an image of a man wearing a collared shirt and a hat as preppy, yet there are no layers to be found. Either then the definition of the Ivy style is a bit loose, or it’s less of a clothing style and more of a clothing genre.

Works Cited

Trufelman, Avery. “American Ivy: Chapter 1.” American Ivy: Chapter 1 – by Avery Trufelman, Articles Of Interest, 26 Oct. 2022, https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/american-ivy-chapter-1.

Avery Trufelman is the director/host of the podcast Kids’ Clothes. In this episode, she discusses how punch cards, an invention used frequently in early computers, had their origins in clothing. She then discusses children’s clothing in depth: its origins and evolution and why it looks the way it does today.

Roman Mars, in speaking to Avery, states “… around and around. The loom inspires the computer, the computer changes the way we buy, order, and think about clothes. Clothing and culture impact each other (“Kids’ Clothes 00:06:45-00:06:56).” The episode makes this claim by visiting the evolution of children’s fashion over time; first with the introduction of children’s clothing in the 18th century and then to safety guidelines for clothing in the 21st century. What intrigues me, and what the episode somewhat glosses over, is the rate at which this cycle occurs.

The inventions or influences the episode mentions during the early period of children’s clothing seem to span over several decades. This stands in contrast to the later part of the episode, where they talk about how children’s clothing is updated constantly in response to incidences, trends, and so on. I assert that, as time has passed, this cycle has sped up. My first reaction was to attribute this cycle to the exponential growth of technology. 

This seems to be the case early on when the demand for fancy clothing led to the invention of the Jacquard loom. But for changes made today, Avery says this: “Every time an item is recalled, or a clothing company gets sued for endangering a child, the guidelines get revised or tightened (Kids’ Clothes 00:18:02-00:18:07)” So safety and litigation, not the advancement of technology, seems to be the driving cause in this case.

So my question is, what is it that has led to the acceleration of this cycle? Is technology not necessarily the cause, but perhaps what enables this change to happen?

Works Cited

Trufelman, Avery. “Kids’ Clothes: Articles of Interest #1.” 99% Invisible, 99% Invisible, 25 Sept. 2018, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/kids-clothes-articles-of-interest-1/.