Fashion Trend Alert: Rise Of The Non-Label & Quiet Luxury

With our myriad cellphones, blackberries, PDAs, iPods, and other gadgets, we have become so info-overloaded, we're rapidly fleeing the Age of Information in favor of one centered around escapism and imagination.

"Daydreaming, fantasy and sleeping are things we need more of," forecast-brand image developer Cheryl Swanson of Toniq recently told WWD, explaining that for brands to succeed, they should design clothes that emanate an "aura of wonder…[and] transcend function and looking cool, and take you to a new place, almost like costuming. Not a uniform. And not all black." (Exhibit A: Prada's Fairy Bag - photo: Bag Snob)

Futurist Faith Popcorn of Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve has a dimmer view of this new era, focusing more on the intangible but pervasive sense of society in a state of collapse, economic uncertainty, layoffs, and ongoing problems in the mortgage market and the Middle East - collectively summed up as life rage. The sartorial solution, according to Popcorn, involves a marked absence of loud logos (an interesting subtext of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in which the book's trend-spotting heroine finds logos on clothing so abhorrent, they literally give her an allergic reaction). "The plainer brands [like Cadillac and Lego] are going to have a chance," she notes, advising brands that success will involve "taking themselves out of the clutter and noise...and whispering in our ears to be heard above the roar of the mediascape…Classics are a bridge to that.