The Illusion of TrendsToday

Trends Were Built at Adidas and Nike Differently to What We Call a Trend Today.

For a very long time, a central part of my career was not about selling more products. It was about creating the conditions in which desire could form.

For nearly 19 years across Adidas, and later at Nike, a big part of the work I was responsible for was not anchored to quarterly sales targets or immediate commercial return. It was anchored to a much harder judgement call, does this belong in culture, and will the people who shape taste and identity accept it as legitimate? I knew if we could answer that honestly and confidently, we often knew the wider market would follow in time. It meant we didn’t need to force anything, because culture had its own gravity when something felt right.

At the time, we didn’t always describe this through formal frameworks, but there were principles I always worked with and I stuck to in practice. We were never trying to manufacture scale. We were trying to create the conditions under which something could ripple outward, naturally, through culture.

That distinction mattered, because it shaped every decision I made.

How Trends Were Actually Built

The way trends moved then followed a very deliberate structure, even if it was rarely drawn on a slide. You could think of it as a pyramid (I still draw it this way when explaining to clients), but it functioned more like a cultural filter.

At the top were what we called tastemakers. These were athletes, designers, creatives, musicians, editors, and subcultures who were shaping identity long before the broader market ever noticed. You could never tell them what to buy and the moment something felt overly engineered or commercially motivated, they tended to dig their heels in and disengage. What they cared about was authorship, credibility, and whether something felt like a genuine extension of their world rather than an intrusion into it.

The objective at that level was never about persuasion or convincing. It was about earning permission and assisting discovery. If those people accepted a silhouette, a story, or a direction, it wasn’t because we sold it to them, but because it aligned with something they already believed in or were moving towards. That acceptance was everything because culture always listens to those signals before it realises it is listening.

Below them were what we called early adopters. These guys weren’t trend-setters in the pure sense, but they were highly tuned into shifts in meaning. They picked up on new signals quickly because they understood symbolism, aspiration, and social language. They adopt and pick up on things quickly not because they are popular, but because they resonate with how they see themselves or who they are becoming. When early adopters embraced something we were putting into the market it was always a good sign, we could tell it was about to become legible to others and that what had been a niche expression was beginning to feel like a recognisable movement.

It was only after that process had taken place did something move into the much wider market. This general market doesn’t want to take cultural risk but instead looks for reassurance. It's when enough people have already accepted something, then that's when it begins to feel safe enough to participate. This is where scale arrived, and this is where revenue followed. The whole process fell under what we called seed, ignite, scale and I still teach it today.

The important part is the order. Meaning came first. Credibility followed. Desire formed. Scale arrived later. Commercial success was the outcome of that sequence, not the starting point and over several months.

Reduced to its simplest form, the system worked like this:

Meaning → Credibility → Desire → Scale → Revenue

Why Scarcity and Distribution Were Never Just Tactics

A lot of what sat underneath this way of working can be traced back to the thinking of The Tipping Point, and those ideas around stickiness and context stayed with me throughout my career and still inform how I think today.

New silhouettes were never simply product launches. They were always signals. They were designed to interrupt familiarity, create a sense that something had shifted, and lingered in people’s minds long enough to matter. Scarcity often played a critical role here, never as a marketing trick, but as a way of giving ideas weight. When access was limited, attention always increased. When people missed out, memory formed. And memory is a big part of how desire is built.

This is why I often say that my job for many years was to make sure people missed out. Not because exclusion was the goal, but because over-availability just drains meaning. When something is too easy to get, it will pass through culture without even leaving a mark. If access has to be earned, delayed, or constrained, it stays with people.

Our distribution worked in the same way. Where a product appeared mattered just as much as what it was. We looked closely at which cities, which stores, which communities, and which cultural environments something entered first, because all of that shaped how it was interpreted. Distribution was not a logistical decision. It was a contextual one. We knew meaning was fragile early on, and placing something in the wrong environment too soon could easily flatten it before it even had the chance to grow.

This is how cultural tipping points were built. Not through volume, but through precision.

What Has Changed in How Trends Form

Firstly, the mechanics of cultural momentum are still alive and exist today, but the way they are triggered has shifted.

We now operate inside systems designed to maximise attention rather than interpret meaning. It's all governed from algorithms that observe what people pause on, react to, share, or watch repeatedly, and then deliver more of the same to more people. Over time, this is what creates the distortion. The things that become most visible are not necessarily the things with the most cultural significance. They are simply the things the system has learned to amplify.

When the same product, aesthetic, or idea is repeatedly placed in front of large numbers of people, it begins to look like a trend. Not because it has emerged organically from identity or shared belief, but because exposure itself creates the familiarity. That familiarity feels like relevance, and relevance is often mistaken for legitimacy.

This is the illusion many platforms now produce. It looks like cultural momentum, but it is often just repeated distribution rather than earned meaning.

At its simplest, the modern mechanism works like this:

Exposure → Normalisation → Perceived Reality

Once that loop is established, it feeds itself:

Exposure → Engagement → Amplification → Re-exposure

Something is shown. People react to it. The system reads that reaction as success and shows it again, more widely. The repetition creates the sense that “everyone is seeing this,” and that perception simply becomes self-reinforcing. The more people jump on it and share it, the loop tightens.

Unlike the past, where trends moved forward through culture and eventually resolved, many trends today circulate inside the same systems that created them. They are recycled, remixed, and resurfaced, often without ever leaving the environment that generated their visibility in the first place.

This is why so many trends today feel familiar rather than feeling new. They persist rather than progress.

Why Creating for Loops Changes the Work Itself

When brands and designers begin creating specifically for these loops, the nature of the work itself changes.

The centre of gravity shifts away from authorship and quickly towards optimisation. Instead of proposing something new, work starts responding to what already performs and instead of shaping culture, it just reinforces circulation. So over time and for me most disturbing is how this trains teams to value immediacy over depth and recognition over resonance. Originality becomes harder to sustain, not because it leaves and can’t return, but because it always takes longer to land and is less predictable inside systems built for speed.

This is exactly how sameness creeps in and the fastest way to average happens. It happens because of convergence not through copying. Different brands, categories, and aesthetics all begin to feel strangely the same because they are all responding to the same signals. What works gets repeated and what needs time gets sidelined.

Once a brand fully falls into this way of operating, it becomes really difficult to step out of it again. Output accelerates, context thins and identity fragments. What initially feels relevant can quietly turn into dependence on the system supplying that relevance.

Why Some Designers Are Choosing Not to Participate

This is why many of the most culturally credible designers today are choosing not to create in accordance with how trends now circulate.

They still engage in using technology but they are super aware of platforms and how they work. In many cases, they understand the mechanics better than most. Their decision is not about rejection, but about protection.

And for those designers whose work is rooted in authorship, craft, and identity, creating for loops often requires compromises that feel fundamental. Things like designing for formats rather than bodies or prioritising recognisability over exploration. Responding to what already exists instead of proposing what could come next.

So they slow down, they release less frequently and they control context more carefully. They choose environments where their work can be met with the attention it requires. In a culture dominated by circulation, opting out becomes a way of preserving meaning. What's really interesting is this restraint often restores credibility and makes scarcity and the mystery returns. And when the work does eventually surface, it carries weight precisely because it hasn’t been circulating endlessly beforehand.

This really  mirrors the world I worked in, where culture was not injected into a system but always entered into carefully, with permission, and with respect for the people who shaped it.

What This Means Now

Let me be clear, this isn’t an argument against technology. It’s an argument for judgement.

There are now so many ways ideas enter the world. Some are built patiently through credibility, memory, and context and others are propelled quickly through exposure and repetition. Both can create visibility but only one consistently creates cultural depth.

It's not at all about rejecting modern systems, but it is about knowing when not to let those systems dictate authorship and knowing that when meaning is outsourced entirely to circulation, identity becomes fragile. If everything is built to loop, very little is allowed to evolve.

The discipline I learned earlier in my career was about protecting meaning long enough for it to take hold and in many cases that took patience. That work hasn’t disappeared but we are constantly focused on a world that says move faster. It has become much harder to do, but far more valuable when it is done well.

Culture still lives and moves through people. It just simply requires more intention now to make sure we are not mistaking repetition for relevance.

That was always the work.

It just asks more of us now.

Nick Gray Founder & CEO | IGU Global