if green pears you like

If I consider it logically, I don't think I'm particularly fashion-forward. I'm the wrong size and shape for a fashionista, runways bore me, I'm afraid of shoes over 3" high, and, most damning of all, I come from an area deep in the irradiated middle of a certain gauche continent.  Nevertheless, it is often my experience that I will fix an object in mind and hunt it fruitlessly for weeks, finally settling on something overpriced and merely similar, only to find a few months later the discount racks flooded with that selfsame object, now a full-on trend.  Interpreting this as some kind of uncanny knack for fashion would be akin to taking my stereo turning on during a thunderstorm as evidence of the existence of ghosts who hate lightning and love Tori Amos.  Still, I'll try my hand at a few predictions. 

INEVITABLE TRENDS
• Steampunk: all the kids who were going to be goth will be this for the next fifteen years, which is a palette-shifted form of goth with brown standing in for black, gold for red, and gears for spiders.  All the kids who were going to be ravers will be werewolves, I guess?
• Head scarves for young muslimahs, but also for non-Islamic punkas protesting the interminable culture wars and girls-gone-wildism. 
• Drag--it will be fashionable for men to dress feminine, and men who refuse will be considered gay. 
• Increasingly obvious factory mistakes in clothing, from "raw edge" hems through "contrast crease details" on prints, right up to the point where workers' fingers are fashionably serged into ruching.  Also look for the return of clothes which are just square, unfinished bolts of cloth, sold as "the universally-flattering sari look".
• A haircut that's, like, a kind of reverse Travis Bickle, with a strip shaved jauntily up the middle and the rest of the hair longer
• Ironic swastikas; ironic yellow stars
• Tooth embellishment; neck tattoos
•All 20th-century decades' retro, always, simultaneously, forever

 GONE FOREVER
• The big platform tennis shoes of the 90s.  I miss them. 
• Anything that takes a great deal of sewing and tailoring to construct 
• Lipstick
• Being "white"
• Ties for men
• Most hats and gloves
• Pubic hair.
• All vintage clothing, eventually, unless it is sealed in lucite
• Clowns; panties
• The concepts of decency and privacy