Trends: The Quest For Cool

The God of the trend spotter is the 14-year-old hipster, and it is a cruel and fickle god with many prophets. Claire Brooks is executive strategic-planning director of the Lambesis Agency, a firm in Carlsbad, Calif., that publishes a trend bible called the L Style Report. Like Zandl, Brooks depends on information from a network of youthful informants, but Brooks runs her data-gathering operation more like a domestic espionage ring. "We have this network of people around the country," she explains. "They are trendsetters--people establishing careers in fashion and music, in film, in marketing, in advertising." She calls them the Urban Pioneers. They're the Navy SEALs of cool, and Brooks is casually ruthless about who makes the cut. "After a while, you just get to know when you're talking to a trendsetter," she explains. "There are a lot of early-mainstream people who really think that they're trendsetters--the people who say, 'I really love Gap.' And you just think, Yeah, you really don't know about that, do you? Whereas the true trendsetter will be making her own clothing. Or her friend will just have started a boutique or a fashion line or whatever." If you find that this kind of talk brings back half-buried memories of being picked last at kickball, you're not alone. It's impossible to talk to Brooks without inwardly measuring yourself against the golden yardstick of cool and coming up short.

Once you look for them, you'll see that America is crawling with these sleeper agents of cool. Dozens of companies--Radar Communications, Teenage Research Unlimited, even TEEN PEOPLE magazine (which, like TIME, is published by Time Inc.)--keep stables of tens of thousands of teenage correspondents, paying them in either cash or product samples and other freebies. Interestingly, the people running these networks are almost exclusively women. The cool industry is a matriarchal one. "Women are the networkers, the chatterers," says Brooks. "I think that what you need in this industry is an ability to get beneath what people are saying and doing and look at what it really means, and I think that those are skills that we are good at."

Jane Rinzler Buckingham is president of a New York City-based trend-spotting company called Youth Intelligence, which was acquired by the powerhouse talent agency CAA earlier this year. Blond and photogenic, she is given to saying mind-altering things like, "If blue is the new black, what's the new blue?" (Trend spotters love to talk about how X is the new Y.) Three times a year, Buckingham and her staff handpick 300 trendsetters via a screening exam that covers music, magazines, brands, activities and TV shows. They recruit in coffee shops, video stores, "cool bookstores" and high schools in four or five different cities. "We're trying to go to places where you'll find some trendsetters, but sometimes we have to split it. We want to go to Kansas City, because sometimes you'll get cool music coming out of Kansas City. But it's hard to find 100 trendsetters in Kansas City."