Free Tales from the Back Row by Amy Odell Page A

of culture and where that mood is going in two years’ time, and they use her predictions to inform their own creative work.
    Chris took me to one of her seminars held at the School of Visual Arts in New York. It felt like going to a planetarium show but about fashion and beauty trends instead of constellations. And, because this is obviously more glamorous, instead of a pamphlet, they give you a bottle of Smart Water and a square of 77 percent cacao rose-salt-and-lemon-flavored chocolate.
    Edelkoort is soft-spoken and wore a black dress over pants in a way only someone who works at an art school can pull off. She began the session with a brief affirmation of her previous predictions, confirming that the trends she said would trend did in fact become a Thing on the runways at Fashion Week. Her presentations consist of single words followed by slides of gorgeous, impeccably curated images to illustrate her point. “Draped” was one trend, visible in a Phillip Lim sandal and a Marios Schwab gown. “Layered” followed—“another obsession,” Edelkoort said. “Very poetic.” Then came “frilled,” aka a shit ton of ruffles, which, Edelkoort explained, “means society at large is moving up again.”
    She then forecasted trends that will appear nearly two years from now. The overarching theme of this collection? “Vanities,” she called it. This is her polite, artistic way of saying that assholes who take endless photos of themselves on social media are not going anywhere any time soon. Ignore them at your own peril, retailers.
    â€œOne morning on the beach in Morocco, I saw a girl. She had been running, and she wanted to take a selfie of herself,” Edelkoort said. “So she checked out the sea and she made a beautiful photo, me and the sea.”
    She continued, “We are in this crazy, crazy moment where people are creating myths of themselves. They are making their lives into larger-than-life events.”
    She described the archetypes of this season in, appropriately, mythic terms: the elf, sylph, and oracle were those she included in this “vanities” forecast. Others included: mermaid, Cleopatra, twins.
    Edelkoort crafts a story for each of her archetypes, making the seminar like story time for adult fashion people. Mermaid, for example, isn’t just indicative of blue and sequins, but rather “young women who go to bars at night beautifully dressed . . . tease the guys, have them buy all the drinks for the girls, and then they just leave them,” she explained. “They’re very nasty. I think men are getting almost afraid of them.”
    The druid, a “darker story,” was inspired by “pagan cults of the Celtic Druids,” who, according to the booklet Edelkoort providedseminar attendees that explained all of these archetypes, predicted the future through bird flight and song and dwelled in the forest. “You look at the forest in the afternoon, it’s shadow and light. It’s using linens, it’s using barklike materials.” The fashion-world druid of 2016 would invoke “magical, mystical, couture fabrics,” Edelkoort explained, including dark greens in yarn and lace paired with other shades of green and purple. Picture a princess who might have lived in a tree in the forest of your favorite ’90s computer game Myst.
    â€œIt’s sort of like an ecological punk; it’s a very good direction here,” Edelkoort continued. “Sort of eco-warriors. I think that the world wants to go there.”
    Over the course of the half-day seminar, Edelkoort told the room to stop making perfumes that smell like cake. She advised clothing makers to sell only a single garment in their stores (mono-­shopping). She proclaimed that hair is the new textile for both women and men. She lingered on a photo of a man with a bushy beard with flowers and leaves growing out of it to prove