Last month, an article in a well reputed e.magazine declared death to the future of trends. Heated responses to the article poured in, both for and against the article's argument, all equally powerful and passionate. Some readers completely agreed with the author's viewpoint, others huffed it was not trends that were dead but merely the e.zine's ability to employ qualified writers. Regardless of on which side of the fence readers sat, the overlying message of the ensuing debate became quite clear: a good majority of our industry is unclear how and why trends exist in our present day.

It's hard to fault these people. Today design cycles speed ahead so quickly that tracking and anticipating them can feel a little like the ever-elusive dangling carrot. Despite the fast pace, trends are not dead (as some might have you believe). Indeed, they are very much alive, but the very nature of trends is changing thus making them harder and harder to recognize.

"A lot of confusion exists regarding trends because of all of the exposure from various medias," explains Britt Bivens, the New York director for the Parisian trend agency Promostyl. Although she spends most days consulting with clients on evolving design directions, she disputes the idea that big trends no longer drive the market forward. "The most important word of this industry is "context", and the real forecasters know how to apply it."

In what context is the nature of trends evolving? What has caused this evolution?

In his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida wrote at length about how the work force has evolved over the past 50 years. Only a few decades ago the majority of the American workforce was made up of manufacturing and middle management positions. Employees were tasked with keeping the corporate wheels turning without rocking the boat. Less than 5% of the workforce then was employed creatively.

Fast forward to the current decade and – according to Florida – 30 percent of the entire American workforce is employed in some form of creative work. With one third of all employees working in a creative capacity, the very nature of their positions involves rocking the boat, challenging the norm, confronting previous design ideals and forcing the user to contemplate a new visual. As a result, new designs have become more frequent and are often offset by cheaper qualities and disposability messages in marketing.

All the while this shift in the creative workforce was taking place (a 50 year cycle), something else was materializing that would change the way we do business. The rise of computers leads to the advent of the internet, and the internet leads to the era of instant global communication. Thirty years ago, women who wanted to learn the latest runway fashions had to wait for Vogue magazine to hit news stands, and even then the issue may have trailed the actual runway shows by months. Today the lead time is microbial. The uploaded photos from a designer's runway collection are on-line within 24 hours. Within a week of any given designer show, literally hundreds of newpaper and e.zine articles will be written and thousands of fashion bloggers will weigh in. While this is only one example - the awareness and subsequent adaptation of design trends (whether fashion, product, or otherwise) is clearly fast forwarded via the internet. Likewise, the acceptance and eventual demise of a given trend is equally sped up.

Yet the internet is a catalyst to the shifting nature of trends in more ways than one, ways which trend forecasters have been speaking about for a few years already and ways which are perhaps most notably described by author and Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson. In his book The Long Tail, Anderson discusses the surprising revenue found in fringe offerings by e.tailers such as Amazon.com. He argues that in the days of physical retail space, "hit" products were the only offerings available to the mass public because stores preferred to stock sure-sellers. By contrast, retail space on the web is unlimited and immaterial, where hit products could sit next to all the rarities, alternatives, and fringe products you could imagine. Anderson calls this the Hidden Majority. He writes, "one way to think of the difference between yesterday's limited choice and today's abundance is as if our culture were an ocean and the only features above the surface were islands of hits." The image is clear: in the past we could easily access only a small percentage of available offerings, those perhaps deemed to be the best by buyers and marketers. In the future we could sort through the entire spectrum.

Herein lies the reason that the nature of trends is shifting, based on simple supply and demand. As more and more products in a given market are made more and more readily available to the masses, those masses are naturally straying from the beaten path of limited purchasing. The more they stray, the more micro trends will pop up. There are less big (macro) trends and less emphasis on any one design style reigning over a given period in time. Selections and choices become more diverse.

It's easy to see how some can mistake this shift to smaller pockets of trends as a disappearance of trends altogether. Those who take the time to look will understand that this evolution is actually a macro trend in the making.