Mudpie Fashion Trend Services

Mudpie Fashion Trend Services introduces the trend forecasting services of Mudpie and indexes the Mudpie trend reports kept on Apparel Search. Mudpie was a British trend forecasting company whose reports, trend books and online service were written for designers, buyers and apparel companies who needed seasonal direction they could act on quickly: which colors to commit to, which silhouettes were rising, what the runways and the high street were actually doing, and how to turn all of that into garments, prints and graphics that would sell.

This first page of the two-page series covers the most recent reports in the collection, from 2009 through 2011 — runway season kickoffs, fashion week reports from New York, Paris, Tokyo and Milan, color and sports forecasts, and the MPDInsight trend stories for spring summer 2013. Page 2 continues the index with the earlier reports, back to 2008, and gives the fuller account of the company, its trend books and the Mpdclick online service.

What Mudpie Offered

Mudpie worked in three connected ways. Its printed trend books gave design teams ready-made, season-ahead direction — hundreds of garment, print and graphic ideas organised so a busy studio could build a range from them. Its Mpdclick online service published photographic reports through the season: runway coverage, retail checks, street photography and trade fair reporting, updated as events happened rather than months later. And its consultancy work answered specific briefs, from color development through to production-ready artwork.

The reports indexed here are the Mpdclick side of that work as Apparel Search readers received it: short, photograph-led summaries, each one dated, each one aimed at a decision a buyer or designer was about to make. Read together they trace four years of the trade's attention — the luxury story of early 2009, the denim and floral seasons that followed, the color calls for spring summer 2011, and the longer-range stories, such as Innovative, Primal and Synergy, that Mpdclick built for 2011 and 2012.

How to Use This Index

Start with the season you are researching and work outward. Each report is kept as the historical record of its date, with its photographs, so the index is also a research tool: it shows what was forecast, when, and on what evidence. Designers mining a period for revival research, students studying how forecasting was written, and buyers judging how long a direction lasted will all find the dated sequence more useful than any single report alone.

Page 2 of this series carries the earlier reports — the 2008 and 2009 fast fashion, runway, retail and textile reports — together with the company profile: Mudpie's eighteen years across the adult, youth and children's markets, its international network, and the six trend books it published each season. The two pages belong together, and the series navigation above links them in order.

A note on the service itself: Mudpie addressed its reports to busy professionals in the fashion and creative industries, and its promise was practical — help in delivering on-trend garments, colors and graphics within the shortest possible time frame. That is why the reports are brief and visual rather than academic, and why they remain readable as a record of how the industry actually consumed forecasting at the time: quickly, season by season, with photographs doing much of the arguing.

The collection also has a shape worth noticing: the reports cluster around the industry's working calendar — runway months, fabric fairs, retail checks between seasons — because that is when decisions fall due. Reading the index by date rather than by subject shows the rhythm of the forecasting year itself, and it explains why some months produced several reports while others produced one: forecasting follows the trade's deadlines, not the other way round.