Spin cycle

Why does your wardrobe look the way it does? What's the most unexpected thing in it, and is it as unexpected as you think? For decades - going back 350 years, in fact, to royal historians in France - this industry has quietly shaped how we choose. It would, after all, be impossible to run such a business if we could all just follow our hearts. So, how does fashion forecasting work? How is it visible in your world? What kings, consultants and advisers have shaped such choices through time? Take a look

- Ambi Parameswaran

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

That's a quote attributed to Yogi Berra, the American baseball catcher, manager and coach. Others, including the physicist Niels Bohr and filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn, have made similar observations.

Predicting future trends has long been an obsession with humans. One of the earliest future-trend predictors was the priestess Pythia at Delphi, in Ancient Greece. She was revered for her prescience on war and other matters of state.

Pythia actually lives on, in modern boardrooms, as the much-revered Delphi Technique, in which a team is made to predict future outcomes, individually, and through repeated rounds arrive at a "most probable" future prediction.

Jump forward about 2,000 years and there was the Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame), the 16th-century French astrologer.

In India, meanwhile, one of the seven Vedic sages, Bhrigu, is seen as the father of Indian astrology (or future predictions).

Predicting the future used to be about the security of a kingdom or a throne: What plagues or enemy action might be coming? Was a drought, or some form of pestilence, imminent? These were the things the people in power were most eager to prepare for.

Today, in addition to governments, businesses need to be better prepared. This is part of what drove sales of futurist Alvin Toffler's 1970 bestseller Future Shock, which has sold over 6 million copies around the world.

The book traces the impact of rapid social and technological change on individuals and society. It highlights the psychological distress and disorientation caused by too much change in a short period.

Toffler coined the term "future shock", and defined it as a state of anxiety and disorientation resulting from an accelerating rate of change. And he was writing more than two decades before the first glimmers of the internet appeared.