All you need to know about trends
A bold claim – but read on and be more confident in your interior design choices.
I received two emails this week. Well clearly that’s a lie, as I had many more than that. But two that stood out. First there was this:
“You read it here first ... avocado bathrooms are back with a bang and BC Designs is predicting it will be one of the defining bathroom trends of 2025…”
And this was the second:
“Britain’s Interior Disasters Revealed: At the top of the worst interior disasters were avocado coloured bathrooms (44 percent)… according to a survey of 2,000 adults by Terrys…”
Both The Telegraph and The Guardian picked up on the first email and ran with it: “The retro bathroom trend making an unlikely comeback: almost a third of renovators aged 25-34 would choose green for their bathrooms…” and “Avocado Bathrooms are back in the UK…”. Meanwhile, everyone seemingly ignored the second email, which somewhat undercut the ‘new trend alert’ narrative.
If it all seems a little arbitrary, that’s because it so often is. That’s the TL;DR version of How Trends Happen.
To which I say (and as the above illustrates): essentially trends don’t matter, since for every person who opts to do something because it’s massively in vogue, there will be another who is BAFFLED by their choice and (given the nature of social media these days), will not hold back from telling them how utterly LACKING in taste, discernment or style they are. So the real question is how much you care about that, versus how much you value being ‘on-trend’.
Still, on the basis of those two emails and the media coverage they generated, it’s official. Green bathrooms are BACK – and soon every magazine, shop window, fashionable Instagram account, etc, will be falling over themselves to show you their green bathrooms and prove just how massively plugged in they are. Of course, you can loftily ignore them all and proclaim yourself above such things as, pffft, trends. (Feel free to go back and read this paragraph in your best Miranda Priestley.)
So this is a post about trends and how to do them. It’s the one subject guaranteed to get everyone hot under the collar and also probably the single factor that drives people to neutrals more than any other, which is also kind of ironic when you think about it.
We’re going to learn how to tell the difference between fad and fashion. We’ll look at The life-cycle of a trend and how you can tell if it’s right for you. And if not, when to ignore what everyone is telling you to do. Then we’ll see what happens when the fashion wagon moves on, leaving you alone with your pineapple cushion and your painted bobbin leg table. Finally, we’ll find out how to avoid trends altogether – and while that’s harder than you might imagine, it’s also what will show you have style.
There’s one other gem that I can share: how to spot what’s coming before it’s even been written about. (And that insider secret is what led to me scheduling this post BEFORE I received either of those two press releases at the top. Yes, I really did.)