“Nigerians think any apparel can be repaired – we’ve seen everything brought in for our tailors, from bras to waist trainers to duvets,” Kanyinsola Doherty of Mend Lagos tells the BBC. Doherty founded Mend Lagos to address the need for specialised alterations beyond obiomas. For the traditional obioma, times have changed for various reasons, and many are being phased out. Security is one reason – increased crime in certain areas has resulted in more neighborhood security patrol. This limits the comings and goings of non-residents, so mobile tailors are no longer able to roam as freely as they previously did. And the economic downturn has also had an effect – due to inflation, many have found the business not sustainable, and have opted out.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression idled thousands of factories. To spur consumption, desperate manufacturers began researchinghow to make their products worse, writes Giles Slade in his book “Made to Break.” By incorporating inferior materials, companies forced people to buy replacements earlier, a practice called “planned obsolescence.”
Today, the idea of degrading the physical durability of many products, although alive and well, has been eclipsed by something more pervasive: “psychological obsolescence.”Persuading consumers to ditch perfectly usable products for more fashionable versions with little more than cosmetic changes has transformed consumer capitalism.
In 2023, clean girl, girl math, Barbiecore, coquette and tomato girl summer dominated our social feeds. This year, these trends have quickly been replaced by mob wife winter, corpcore and loud budgeting. That’s the thing about micro-trends: they’re fleeting.
In this sense, they’re not really micro-trends at all, argues trend forecaster Agustina Panzoni. “When you look at trends, you look at movements that span multiple years and multiple seasons on the micro-side,” she says. “So what has been labelled ‘micro-trends’ are more like ‘internet aesthetics’. They’re pre-packaged styles that you can buy into.”
Most significantly, as I found out, reaching potential customers is shockingly easy: In the course of testing TikTok’s seller tools, a placeholder listing for a used mechanical pencil got me more than a thousand livestream viewers, most of whom were as confused as I was. (More about that soon.)
“Knowledge is power,” Bianca Rangecroft, founder and CEO of digital wardrobe app Whering, says. First launched primarily as a styling tool, the app has seen a 129 per cent increase in people tracking their wardrobe in the past year. “The number one reason why [people] are coming to Whering is because it actually gives real time insights,” she notes. “I get [to see] what’s high versus low utilisation, what are some of the things that I’m wearing on repeat – and, lastly, a look into my cost per wear.”
Northwestern University’s Mobility and Behavior Lab, led by Amanda Stathopoulos, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, wanted to know if consumers were ready for robots to replace delivery drivers, in the form of automated vehicles, drones and robots. The team found that societally, there’s work to do to shift public perceptions of the near-future technology.
“We need to think really carefully about the effect of these new technologies on people and communities, and to tune in to what they think about these changes,” Stathopoulos, the study’s senior author, said.
” We know that a lot of people have difficulty accessing fresh fruits and vegetables, whether that is due to expenses, whether that’s due to the fact that they may live in a food desert. So by having these produce items available on our farm market trucks, we can help improve food access throughout Western New York,” she says.
Adjacent to the shipping containers are large panel trucks, with canopy windows that open outward like a food truck, to create mobile farmer’s markets, that can be driven to food deserts regardless of the weather.
“The creative director’s role is to make the brand prominent in the current zeitgeist, so that it grows faster than competitors. The faster the market growth, the higher the pressure,” says Solca.
The problem, for teenagers and shopping mall managers alike, is not TikTok: it is the lack of physical spaces where teens can be together, blow off steam and learn the rules of engagement – a problem that is perhaps worse than ever.
The idealized mallgoer of the 1950s was a young, married white woman, likely with children in tow. Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck’s striking modernist design for Milliron’s Department Store in Hawthorne, California, a fast-growing aerospace suburb, included a nursery next to the rooftop parking deck, while Park Central Shopping City in Phoenix was rated “best in class” for its four-room Old Woman in the Shoe playhouse for children. Mothers who spent more than $3 at any store in the mall could validate their receipt for one free hour of babysitting.
“We set out to disrupt the night out on the town when it comes to the theater,” says Warren Adcock, the creative director of Midnight Theatre and a veteran of David Blaine Productions. “It really is about a full night in New York City with all the bells and whistles under one roof. We wanted to create an experience that feels good.”
Analyzing Trends 