Say what you like about trend-spotter Marian Salzman, but she is not one to deliver her cool commandments in condescending fashion. Ten minutes after I meet her, she is, in an effort to illustrate one of her latest maxims, wriggling around with bumptious enthusiasm on a luxury bed while I, the photographer, and several astonished bystanders stare on limply, like the production crew of some low-budget porn film. This is, I reflect, a woman who is not afraid to get her hands dirty in the course of her work.
How gratifying it is that Salzman should be as enthusiastic a consumer as the rest of us. She has arranged to meet us at the Mac make-up counter in Selfridges on Oxford Street. As soon as she arrives, however, she decides that bedding is hotter than cosmetics, and we troop up four floors in search of some. Salzman's latest theory, it turns out, is that sleep is now more important to the average young professional than sex. Airlines in America, she tells me excitedly in the lift, now compete to offer passengers the ability to "sleep flat". Putting our time and our money into our bedrooms, she says, is about carving out a haven for retreat - increasingly our cash is going on duvets costing thousands of pounds, on scented candles, reading lights, even televisions and internet terminals built into our beds. The pharmacological side of sleep is also now a huge sell.
"At least in New York, the best way to turn yourself into the most popular person at a dinner party," she tells me, "is to let word get out that you have some sleeping pills on you." I make a mental note to invest in some sleeping pills.
New York is the acknowledged world capital of cool-hunting and Salzman - a sassy, brassy New Yorker herself - is one of the biggest cool-hunters around. A veteran in the fly-by-night world of corporate trend-spotters - the kind of people who attract the curiosity of magazine writers like Malcolm Gladwell, and the scorn of anti-brand campaigners like Naomi Klein - she is so animated and enthusiastic an interviewee, such a scattergun of fascinated consumer babble, that she might be mistaken for a character in a musical. Quite literally, she appears to have a nose for trends, one which seems to visibly twitch and pucker when she is about to identify a trend or define a new phenomenon.
One tactic employed by professional trend-spotters is to stand in a corner and observe the behaviour of shoppers at close quarters. They even have a name with which to dignify it - ethnographic research - and I decide to apply it to Salzman as we walk along Oxford Street. In 1998, Salzman predicted that in the following few years the hippest colour around would be "Millennium Blue". Within a couple of years Apple had given us its famous blue iMac, mobile phones came with Bluetooth and brands of all descriptions were fighting to associate themselves with anything blue. When I ask her about it as we walk, she is modest about her involvement. The idea of Millennium Blue, she says, was something that was already in the ether; all she did was to pick it up and run with it. But it makes me wonder exactly how the trends business works.
As soon as we walk into Gap, for example, Salzman points out, with more than a little disdain, a display of brown jumpers. Several years ago, she says, it was decided somewhere that brown was the new black and now this has trickled its way down to the high street. But how, I wonder? Well, she says, Gap's own trends people would have consulted with a range of trend-spotters, maybe even Salzman herself. Trend-spotters may well be ahead of the game, but at least some of their prognostications seem to work as self-fulfilling prophecies. If someone like Salzman sells your company a prediction that blue will be fashionable in two years or that brown will be the new black, the chances are you will throw a little brown or blue into your brand, people will buy it and - hey presto - two years later people will talk about how the colour blue or brown became the height of cool. Fashion and culture may well change at the drop of a hat, but making clothes takes time - and so many of the trends are decided behind our backs, long in advance.
Salzman points to another chunky, sturdy Gap sweater - this time with a little more approval - and traces it, like some urban archaeologist, to the "working man as hero" look which influenced consumers after September 11. In general, she thinks, Gap's range for men is a little too feminine, at odds with the clothes worn by the customers and even the staff. "See," she says, pointing in the direction of one gruff-looking security guard. "He's not wearing it." Then her eye alights on an effete, skinny man wearing shorts and she ostentatiously points him out as someone who might like this stuff. Sure enough, he takes a shirt and shuffles off to the changing room, either to try it on or to evade Salzman's prying eye.
Last year, Salzman won a brief flurry of global publicity when she argued that heterosexual men were morphing into metrosexuals - preening, feminised creatures obsessed with their own appearance - and I wonder how her criticism of the men's range at Gap tallies with that thesis. When we find a table outside a cafe in South Molton Street, the very temple of West End pampering, she takes the trouble to fill me in. It turns out that she has revised her view since last year. In her new book, The Future of Men, Salzman argues that modern man has moved on from being a prissy metrosexual and now aspires to become "ubersexual" - an icon of traditional, classic manhood, steeped in quality and connoisseurship. Neither I nor the photographer, she decides, matches up to the brief. But she looks up from her Greek salad to point out a passerby, a slightly bearded man wearing a neat black suit with an open-necked shirt, as a good example of the breed. "It's his own style, conducted in his own way," she says.
However easy it looks, spotting trends and predicting the future is an unpredictable business. In New York and London in the late 1990s, the technology boom gave rise to a brief period in which futurology was all the rage. Futurologists, trendspotters and cool-hunters of all descriptions were courted by industry and marketing agencies in return for exhilarating promises of a future laden with wealth and technological progress. Few managed to predict that the dotcom bubble would puncture itself, and most were even slower to see their P45s winging their way around the corner as revenues drained out of the marketing and advertising industries. Nowadays, cool-hunting is still a good business to be in, but its practitioners have been reined in to focus on the short term, and to think more strategically about what can be used to make a fast buck. Salzman's focus, she says, is on what is going to whistle its way from the margins to the mainstream very quickly - within 12 to 18 months - and how to make money out of it for her clients. And she is realistic about the time-horizon afforded to today's crystal ball gazers.
"At a time when chairmen and CEOs are rewarded on a quarter by quarter basis, I don't think very many corporations will invest in a 10-year scenario plan. It just doesn't pay." She admits that not everyone in her industry is well respected, but she refuses to be bitchy about her peers. "If you're wrong, people do tend to remember," she says. "And if you're right, people tend to remember that, too."
It would be easy to scoff at the gall with which someone like Salzman can pluck trends from thin air. But what the best cool-hunters do is simply follow the money. At a time when we are encouraged to define ourselves by what we buy and how much we spend, cool-hunting is not only an excellent way to make more money, but also a good a way to take the cultural temperature. When she points out that if she weren't in the marketing business she'd be moving into selling scented candles or home security systems, it behoves us to sit up and listen, for it tells us something - often something a little sinister - about the way we live now.
Another of Salzman's trend-spotting baubles comes from her prediction, a decade ago, that pets were rapidly becoming an essential part of the American family, and that they would shortly be spending vast amounts on pampering their mutts and moggies. "People," she says, "now want unconditional affection, the desire to have something in their life that doesn't talk back." But surely that is a little tragic? "Is it?" she says. "I don't know. The more I do, the fewer opinions I have." I insist that she jumps off the fence on this one, but she refuses to budge. "If I had money, and someone came to me with a chain of Doggy Day Care Centres - well, anywhere I've ever seen them, they've taken off." She tipped off some friends in Holland about the trend many years ago, she says, and they told her she was crazy. A couple of years later, however, she phoned one of her Dutch friends who happened to mention that her dog was at the Doggy Day Care Centre. She almost yelps with frustration. "I'm so crazy, but two years later they're taking care of your dog."
Trend trail
1 Cosmetics, announces Salzman, are less cool than bedding. And sleep is cooler than sex.
2 A few doors up Oxford Street, Salzman surveys the Gap shopfloor. The jumpers prove that brown has trickled down from trend prophets to the high street; the sturdy sweaters are, of course, very post-9/11.
3 Lunch and people-watching on South Molton Street. Look, there goes the new brand of man, an ubersexual: 'It's his own style, conducted in his own way'.
