What interior design can learn from fashion about the urgency of new trends
There’s something almost mystical about the way trends seem to emerge from thin air. One day, it suddenly seems like everyone is speaking the same visual language. New collections unfold across brands, cities, and disciplines, sharing certain shades, textures, or moods. It’s not imitation. It’s intuition.
Trends aren’t tangible. They’re an energy, a shared current. You can almost feel it, like that invisible shift before the rain, or, as Phil Collins would sing, you can feel it coming in the air tonight.
Over the past few weeks of fashion shows, I have been contemplating this phenomenon. This season’s quiet urgency for something new, the need to surprise and reinvent. Yet, despite the diversity of voices, there’s always a thread connecting them all. A certain tone, rhythm, or palette that runs through everything.
Some Fashion Week inspirations.
And that, to me, is what makes it fascinating: how the same language can speak in so many dialects, express so many aesthetics, tell so many stories. Unpredictability holds power. It allows reinterpretation, new stories, and fresh perspectives.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always been drawn to the gaze of street-style photographers, fascinated by the “eye” of Bill Cunningham and how they capture the moment when a collective mood takes shape on real people, in real life.
His lens didn’t just document fashion: it revealed the instant when intuition becomes visible, when an invisible idea suddenly comes to life on the street.
Fashion and design share that same pulse.
Both are born from emotion, shaped by instinct, and both, in their own way, are mirrors of who we are. Maybe it isn’t just about what’s next.
What we can learn from this is that they’re about what we’re collectively feeling — a reflection of our shared imagination, our society, our moment.
Some see fashion or design as superfluous, but I don’t think anything speaks more truthfully about who we are than the way we dress, shape our surroundings, and present ourselves to the world.
But we can’t keep wondering what the whimsical world next season will bring us, can we? So I connect every thread of inspiration and compile it into this fall/winter trend ebook.
