Read the full article on the NYTimes for all the Fashion details, excerpt below, and look at the actual Google charts by clicking on the inaugural report.
Surging “tulle skirt” searches spread from Utah in 2013.
Normcore? So last year. String bikinis? Most definitely over.
Even interest in skinny jeans may be waning, if six billion fashion-related queries by Google users are any indication of this year’s most popular trends.
Instead, consumers are Googling tulle skirts, midi skirts, palazzo pants and jogger pants, according to the company, which plans to start issuing fashion trend reports based on user searches twice a year. The new trend aggregations are part of the company’s bid to become a bigger player in e-commerce and fashion beyond its product search engine or advertising platform.
In its inaugural report, Google distinguishes between “sustained growth” trends, like tulle skirts and jogger pants; flash-in-the-pan obsessions like emoji shirts and kale sweatshirts; and “seasonal growth” trends, or styles that have come back stronger every spring, like white jumpsuits. It makes similar distinctions among sustained declines (peplum dresses), seasonal ones (skinny jeans) and fads that are probably over and done (scarf vests).
Lisa Green, who heads Google’s fashion and luxury team, said the company had begun working with major retailers, including Calvin Klein, to help them incorporate real-time Google search data into fashion planning and forecasting. “Fast fashion” companies, for example, can take a trend identified by Google and run with it, Ms. Green said.
“We’re interested in being powerful digital consultants for our brands, not just somebody they can talk to about what ads they can buy online,” she said. “They can say, ‘Google has identified this as a trend, and we have six weeks to get this out on the racks.’ ”
Google’s foray into the fashion world is part of a scramble to define, inform and tap into how people search online for everything they can buy, be it clothes or jewelry, groceries or furniture.
The search giant has long experimented with e-commerce through services like Google Shopping, which lets shoppers compare prices among different vendors, and the recently introduced Shopping Express, which lets users make grocery purchases from local retail stores and receive them on the same day or the next one. But the company’s e-commerce business trails behind Amazon or Alibaba, the established go-to sites for a plethora of products, and in fashion, Yoox and Net-a-Porter are about to merge and flex their muscles as a luxury retailing powerhouse.
