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.