Free Tales from the Back Row by Amy Odell

ever made me look good.
    â€œWear that when you see him. You’ll get back together,” Chris said.
    â€œIt’s sixty-five dollars, though,” I pointed out.
    â€œJust get it. You only live once. You’ll look back on your early twenties and regret not buying that and all the shortest, tightest dresses you can find. Trust.”
    I wore the red American Apparel dress to see the guy. Chris was right: we got back together.
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    There are two kinds of people in this world: those who wear leather pants and those who do not. You probably wouldn’t own leather pants unless you had a place to wear them. Like a casino in Europe. Or Fashion Week.
    That is because trends are environment-driven. Of course, the people working in the fashion industry wear the weirdest-looking stuff—they exist in a hot tub of eccentricity where material personal effects are what most immediately separates them from Not Them. Having spent a number of years in fashion media by this point, I own and wear leather pants now. Once I started workingfor Cosmopolitan.com in the Hearst Tower—which also houses the employees of Elle and Harper’s Bazaar —it seemed like a non­option. Leather pants are to the Hearst building what cowboy hats are to Montana: a part of the landscape.
    You might think we have fashion designers to thank/blame for the nonsensical apparel that people can pull off only in the presence of other fashion people. It’s true: we do have fashion designers to thank/blame for the trends that trickle down to fast fashion stores like Forever 21 and Zara, where everyone shops and everyone can be made to look like a dumpier version of a fashion show model. A few designers, like Marc Jacobs and Miuccia Prada, hold such outsize influence that whatever they show one season everyone copies the next. When Marc Jacobs puts models in Amish shoes, and everyone declares him a genius, I smile and nod the way I would when someone shows me photos of their baby. I can understand that this means a great deal to the parent and other people in that parent’s inner circle, but I cannot—will not—ever “get” it. Other people’s baby photos are just never going to mean the same thing to me as they do to people who just like babies. The same goes for most fashion. If it did, I’d be Carine Roitfeld. She is a magical fashion-world nymph who makes humans feel embarrassed to be human. I am the girl who makes other people feel better about themselves by existing.
    The truth is, there is an even Higher Power than fashion designers. They are called trend forecasters , and they are the weather people of fashion. While the weather people check climate trends, wind patterns, ocean currents, and so forth, trend forecasters monitor the length of our hemlines and the height of our heels. They predict the dress of everyone everywhere, and no one even realizes it. Walk by Ann Taylor and see what’s in the window. Passthrough a grocery store checkout line and see the latest red carpet fashions to make the covers of the tabloids. These are, at their core, the results of the decisions made by trend forecasters.
    Chris, one of my primary enablers, is a devotee of the world’s premiere trend forecaster Li Edelkoort. Every time he talks about her, it’s like he’s just seen a real-life centaur. Because she’s that magical. All she has to do to influence what cosmetics and fashion companies sell is say words like moss , nomad , yurt in a seminar, and then every fast fashion store ends up with a post­apocalyptic earth mother look that leads to all of us wearing Teva knockoffs and burlap crop tops for a whole season. On the upside, in addition to the comfortable shoes, we’ll save time combing our hair.
    Edelkoort is paid to give lectures to employees of the world’s biggest brands that make everything from makeup to clothes to cars. She tells them the current mood