The future of almost eve.., p.16
The Future of Almost Everything, page 16
How catwalks and fashion launches will change
Fashion parades will continue to push towards every extreme, with models parading semi-nude, completely veiled, clean, muddy, soaked, icy, body-painted – anything to get attention. But none of this will create popular third millennial fashion.
Expect a backlash against the traditional catwalks in New York, London, Paris and Milan. Four weeks of shows, thousands of events, tens of thousands of outfits. Some fashion leaders will explore ways to completely reinvent how they launch their collections, for a web-mobile world, where attention spans are only seconds.
Traditional styles will endure at work
Executive workplace clothing for men is likely to remain unchanged for the next 30 years, as a globally accepted but visually boring uniform. It is striking how little men’s suits, shirts and ties have evolved since the year 1901.
Identikit suits for men will remain the ‘safe’ norm, usually with shirt and tie, as will similarly sober dress styles for women, adapted heavily for life in countries like Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Malaysia or India.
Exotic and eccentric styles will continue to be frowned on, seen as conveying an image of eccentric and risky decision-making. Exceptions will of course be in fashion, design and other creative industries such as software, App development and many startups. And on ‘dress-down’ days in some corporations.
Expect leisure fashion cycles for women to be as short as 12 weeks for some design houses by 2025, requiring shorter supply chains, faster design to production, in an ever more frenetic attempt to increase sales. Some of this retail hyperactivity will implode with big losses, to be replaced by slower seasonal stock changes.
New fabrics and textures
Expect revolutions in fabric properties, especially in new ranges of synthetic fibres. These will create exciting opportunities for designers: clothes that change colour, new textures, textiles with nanotech treatments that self-clean or air-clean. Expect to see wide use of intelligent clothes with displays and sensors that change with temperature in colour or texture, or made of material which itself changes colour with temperature, or with accessories ‘wired’ with functionality, such as belts, hats, glasses, watches, gloves or trainers – for example providing readouts of distance runs.
Future of cotton and polyester
Cotton is a really important industry for many emerging markets, and supports over 300 million jobs. We grow 25 million tons of cotton every year on 2.5% of the world’s arable land, mainly on smallholdings of around 2 hectares, and the global cotton trade is worth $12bn a year. The largest exporters are America and Africa, and the largest hoarder is China, with stocks equal to more than 6 months of global output.
The cotton industry will continue to grow, much in line with global population, but will decline as a proportion of all fibre types. This will be the case even in tropical nations where cotton has a key advantage over polyester in absorbing moisture. Cotton is being displaced by polyester at a rate of around 7% a year in the US.
Expect huge improvements in water use, pollution reduction, productivity per acre, pesticide reduction, and promotion of independently certified, ethical, sustainable cotton. In contrast, synthetic fibres are simple, chemical products, made from oil. Expect a public relations battle over whether polyester or cotton is the most sustainable and responsible fabric to wear.
Future of sport – tribes at play
Just like fashion, sport will continue to be dominated by tribalism: support for individuals, local teams or national champions, celebration of extraordinary physical skill, cheered on by tribal admirers. And then there is the huge social status from ‘owning a tribe’ such as a football team.
In some ways the world of sport will change only slowly. For example, we can expect very few significant alterations in rules for most sports, and few new global sports. Sport will continue to be a focus for entire nations, with huge media pull for important live events, some drawing audiences of more than 1 billion. Revenues from broadcasting and related advertising will continue to dominate the sporting calendar, while most leading sports celebrities will earn far more from corporate sponsorship deals than from winning competitions.
However, we will see more news stories about how results have been fixed, by gangs linked to betting syndicates in countries far away from the event itself. Multiple scandals will threaten to bring entire sports into disrepute – with football in the frontline after years of problems in cricket. Just about every kind of major sporting event will be implicated. Some ruling bodies may turn out to be implicated or corrupt themselves.
Expect huge bets on, for example, whether there will be three free kicks before half-time, or whether a particular player will be injured or will score a goal, and similar things in cycling, Formula 1, and so on. And as we have seen, there will be many questions in future about the credibility of athletics world records in the light of biotech doping.
Future of family and relationships
So, then, we have seen the importance of tribalism for the future of the EU, for nations, companies, brands, marketing, fashion and sport. But the family is the primary unit of tribalism. How will family tribes change in future?
Despite nonsense predictions by many social scientists over the last two decades, family life has continued relatively unchanged in most parts of the world. Couples develop relationships, usually get married, want to have children, and often live in extended family situations, especially in emerging markets or immigrant communities.
Family breakdown
Developed nations – and a growing number of emerging economies – are experiencing a cluster of trends that can influence each other. Rise in family breakdown; more absent fathers; emotional upset and behavioural problems in children; poor school performance; and risks of adding to an unemployable and disaffected underclass. Teachers, social workers, probation officers and judges in family courts see these trends every day.
In the UK, most couples over the last 10 years have decided to have children without getting married. This is despite most studies showing that happiest couples, and ones most likely to stay together, are those that are married, particularly if they have had few other relationships before their wedding day.
The popularity of marriage will vary with income. Wealthy, middle-class couples in some nations are far more like to marry before they have children. Many of the poorest and least educated are rejecting marriage altogether.
Absent dads
The UK has one of the highest percentages of absent dads in the world: fathers who have little or no contact with their children, following breakup of the relationship. That means absent male role models, less money to support the children, and higher costs for housing. Family breakup is often a fast-track to poverty.
Family breakup is also strongly associated with higher risks of mental illness in children (and later on in adulthood) of addiction, risk-taking, teenage pregnancy, suicide and relationship breakup as adults. So we are likely to see a generational impact, beyond 2050, from events in families over the last decade alone.
The impact on such children is often made worse by the fact that in many cases both parents are struggling to survive financially, both working full time, possibly with more than one job each. So parenting is often outsourced to childminders, friends or relatives.
The pendulum always swings somewhere new
Over the next three decades, we are likely to see a partial swing away from previous patterns of ‘sexual liberation’. In some countries we are already seeing a significant rise in the age of first sexual experiences.
For example, in America, the number of 15–19-year-olds who have had sex before 15 fell from 19% to 11% in women, and from 21% to 14% in men, in just 12 years from 1995 to 2008. In nations like Uganda, these trends have been driven by fear of AIDS – most Ugandans have attended at least twenty AIDS funerals in the past decade or so, usually of relatives. But more globally, we are seeing a rethink about what sex is really about in many communities.
Rise of responsible and conservative teenagers
A new generation is emerging that is the most socially conservative for a decade in countries like the UK. Not only has there been a sharp drop in teenage pregnancies to the lowest rate in 40 years, but more young people are rejecting alcohol, drugs and sex at an early age.
One in six admitted to taking drugs in 2014, half the level of 2003. Only 9% are drinking alcohol each week compared to 25% a decade before. The numbers who have ever tried alcohol also dropped from 61 to 39% over the same time period. Smoking also fell from 41% to 24% – with numbers of regular smokers down to only 3% compared to 9%. These are huge changes, born out by repeated studies, and also by the experience of retailers/suppliers on the high street.
This generation is likely to question what kind of life they want for their own children. Some will want to give their own children more parental time than they had themselves when they were young, even if that means working fewer hours, and having a lower standard of living. Such future parents will also be less likely to place their own young children in full-time professional childcare.
Older people as anchors and free childminders
Many grandparents will find themselves helping out with grandchildren, and will become much-loved role models in many areas of life; many happy long-term relationships will be formed, and of course grandparents will save the family money that would otherwise be spent on childcare. As we have seen, for economic and family reasons, more households will have three generations living under the same roof. Some grandparents will provide welcome stability at times of family strain, but others will place impossible stress on the marriages of their children.
We are also likely to see more informal fostering or adoption in wealthier nations of retired people as substitute grandparents, or aunties or uncles, by parents with children at home, where generations of blood relatives are separated by distance or family tensions.
A growing number of children share the same mother but have different fathers, with these father-figures coming and going over the years. Such children will often experience complex rivalries with step-brothers or sisters, and complex relationships with grandparents.
Web censorship and child protection
Many parents of young children that I talk to are very anxious indeed about how to protect their children online. They have sleepless nights worrying about what access to allow, what is fair, and if their children will be teased or bullied if parents don’t allow various things. And they know that whatever the family rules are, their children may be getting unrestricted access anyway, to every kind of very disturbing ‘adult’ material, through friends at school.
Parents are horrified to learn from repeated surveys that most 8–10-year-old boys and girls have watched very explicit sex videos. And that most 14-year-olds feel it is part of normal life to be bullied into sending photos of their genitalia to classmates (sexting).
In the UK, 20% of all 11–13-year-old girls are already secretly padding their bras before they go to school, because they feel embarrassed to be flat-chested at such an old age. Just another small aspect of the wider issue of teenage angst, self-doubt and social pressure that are the result of a hypersexual culture.
Parents of teenagers are anxious in every nation
I have seen this same parental anxiety in every part of the world, through the work of the AIDS charity ACET that I started years ago. Our educators have seen over 5 million high school students, teaching classes in high schools on relationships and sexual health, in twenty nations, ranging from Russia to Kazakhstan, Thailand, India, Uganda and Ireland. We usually find it is the parents who are most keen for our lessons to take place.
Governments of nations like China, Russia, Malaysia and Thailand – which tend to have a more autocratic approach to what they think is good for people to watch or read about – have already taken the lead in global efforts to clean up the web. Remember that 85% of the world’s people will be living in these parts of the world by 2025.
These regions are on the whole far more traditional than Europe or America when it comes such matters, and watch with growing incomprehension what they regard as the ‘moral decay’ of many developed nations.
Expect more government-imposed filters and other initiatives, aiming to regulate access to ‘corrupting’ websites, to be active in over 50 nations by 2025, covering over 60% of the world’s population, up from 35% today. Even though 400 million people already use private networks to get round such censorship, these networks will become illegal or require a special licence in many countries.
Outrage over abuse of women and children
Another sign of change in developed nations like the UK and America is the massive outcry recently over celebrities who abused their status in the 1970s and 1980s to sexually abuse teenagers and younger adults.
In the 1970s and 1980s many British women accepted that it was normal (but nasty) if a work colleague pinched their bottom in a lift, or tried to put a hand up a skirt in the office. Today, such acts may mean a prison sentence if repeated – even if they took place decades ago, and even if the woman didn’t complain about it at the time, or at any point during the following 35 to 40 years.
So while many societies have become hyper-sexualised, as seen in advertising, music videos, fashion, magazines and TV, it is also true that many societies in developed nations are becoming more sensitive about sexual abuse of women and children in particular.
Marketing executives, designers and film-makers will all need to tread carefully as they seek to navigate these changes, sensing what is no longer appropriate and will now risk offence. For example, one of the most iconic adverts of the 1990s was a poster campaign for Wonderbra with the slogan: ‘Hello Boys!’. The posters were so eye-catching that they were blamed for some car accidents by male drivers. Whether such a campaign would be so widely acceptable today is open to question.
Growing number of commercial sex workers
Prostitution will continue to be a growth industry in many nations where up to 10% of men have paid for sex. In the UK alone, one in 20 students (100,000 across the country) are paying their way through university with jobs as prostitutes, escorts, lap dancers or filmed performers. One in five students have considered the option. Globally, at least 40 million women are commercial sex workers, while a further 40–60 million are in less formal arrangements, providing men with sexual companionship in exchange for food just to survive. Around 12 million women and 2 million children are ‘slaves’ – trafficked, tricked, trapped – in one of the fastest-growing criminal activities in the world. Expect many new regulations and deregulations as governments struggle to respond to demand for prostitution.
Rethink on age of consent
In Spain the legal age of consent is 13, compared to 21 in Bahrain, 18 in Turkey and India, 17 in Ireland, 16 in UK, 14 in China and 12 in Angola. In some nations, all sex outside marriage is illegal, as in Kuwait where the minimum age for marriage is 15 for girls and 17 for boys.
Expect a major debate on the issue in nations where ages of consent are higher for same-sex relationships, as in Finland, Greece, Austria and Malta. Expect harmonisation downwards in some European countries. We will also see a relaxation of laws in some of the 79 nations in the world where homosexual acts are illegal.
However, any future debates about ages of consent in general will be dominated by one argument: if we do lower the legal age further, it will mean more adults escape justice, because they will not have broken any law by grooming and seducing (even) younger girls or boys.
The romantic dream will remain strong
The romantic ideal is very powerful, has not changed in over 200 years and will endure for the next 200. One reason is the powerful genetic instinct of human beings to form intense bonding relationships.
Almost all young people hope one day to find an amazing person who fulfils them in every way, with whom every day is treasured. If the romantic ideal remains unchanged and powerful, and if breakup is more often the reality, then it tells us that our future world will be full of disappointed people. And also full of people whose self-esteem has taken a knock as a result of an unhappy or broken relationship.
All this will guarantee that in many nations the market continues to grow for relationship advice, marriage counsellors, agony columns, confidence-building activities, dating agencies, romantic city breaks, Valentine’s day gifts, bedroom fashion wear, sexual therapists, and a very wide range of other products and services to help couples keep their romance alive.
And marriage or re-marriage is likely to become more popular again in some nations where decline has been greatest, even if the event takes place only when a baby is expected or shortly afterwards.
Sex industry adds to worries about performance
Recent research cited by Forbes magazine and the BBC showed that 4% of websites and 13% of web searches are pornography related, based on global search teams and an analysis of the world’s million most popular sites. These figures are lower than often quoted in older studies – more women are online these days and e-commerce means that the web is used for more things.
Even the most popular video porn sites have only a tiny fraction of the traffic of sites like YouTube. The busiest of such sites globally is used by 2.5% of all online users, with around 32 million visitors a month. Revenues from selling porn have fallen sharply over the past decade, because of wide availability of free online content.
Research suggests that 2% of men are addicted to online porn, and a further 30% experience various degrees of dependency, which can damage their relationships. Dependency on online porn is one of the commonest complaints cited by women in American divorce papers.
Professional help for sexual performance
There can be little doubt that widespread consumption of porn has changed expectations in some men (and women) about their own relationships and capabilities, often in completely unrealistic, and possibly damaging, ways.
