Is WGSN Destroying Creativity?

And of the ‘good data’ critics say that often it’s just as easy to find better and free content on the web. WGSN’s city section is a poor man’s version of Super Future and you can get as many photos of the catwalks on Style.com as you can on WGSN (granted you can’t get the high quality – but after you’ve seen the idea and stolen it, how high a quality do you need an image to be?).

There’s also a concern for its reach and depth when it comes to research. WGSN stands for Worth Global Style Network but from what we understand their structure seems to be far from global. The power of the brand convinces its clients that it has an international research team but we’re told that the US has only 5 full time staff and there are only 2 staff in Hong Kong.

All of this provides poor trends data that everyone uses to create next year’s styles, fashion and design. It destroys creativity. The problem is that WGSN holds such power on the industry that it’s now considered by many brands that it’s unwise not to subscribe to it. When the sports brand Umbro cancelled their subscription recently to try to bring fresh and original creativity back to the design team, we’re told that the reaction from WGSN was ‘How dare you?’

WGSN doesn’t just encourage mediocrity, it’s about to bite the hand that fed it: The creative industries in the US and Europe are in for a final shock. There’s an over-simplistic theory held in many creative industries that the best designers come from the West and the best, or at least cheapest, production happens in the East. True or not, that’s how the business works today. What happens when the East doesn’t need the West? WGSN are about to give the fashion and creative industries a serious blow – WGSN plans to translate the whole site into Mandarin and provide the patterns of the catwalks on their site. Factory owners in the East don’t need to wait for European and US brands to put orders in anymore, they can just sign in to the system, see what’s on the catwalk, download the pattern and go straight to production. What will happen then, when continents of designers have no training in developing new ideas to fight that onslaught?

Use WGSN? What do you think – leave a comment!