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Amiyra Perkins, Textile/Surface Design ’10, forecasts for Pinterest

By Raquel Laneri

Amiyra Perkins can predict the future. As a trend forecaster, she can divine—or at least guess with surprising precision—what we will be wearing, driving, eating, buying, and thinking months, even years, in advance.

“My sweet spot is about two to five years out,” she says. “Certified futurists can forecast nearly a decade out, but they tend to work in social policy, government.” She doesn’t have that patience. “I need to be in something that I can actually impact a little faster.”

Perkins’ insights do have a rapid impact. She is a senior lead of creative strategy at Pinterest, an online platform where users share and look for images that will inspire them, from food and travel photography to outfit ideas and home decor. She uses her knack for knowing what people will want to help brands create ads that will stand out amid the platform’s sea of aspirational pictures, and she helped develop an annual report of the next big trends called Pinterest Predicts.

Because Perkins works with some unlikely clients (banks, technology companies, fast-food restaurants), she finds ingenious, surprising ways for them to promote their services.

For example, in 2023, her team noticed a spate of Pinterest users searching for “deep conversation starters” and “questions for couples to reconnect”—suggesting a desire to “break down walls and form stronger connections,” Perkins says. She sensed this yearning would grow, and Pinterest Predicts named Big Talk one of its top trends of 2024. Then the team worked with McDonald’s to launch the new Grandma McFlurry, so when people searched anything related to relationships and communication on Pinterest, an ad appeared in their grid featuring an older and a younger woman on a bench enjoying the caramel-drenched ice cream treat. Viewers could then click to book a calendar date with their grandmother to chat over McFlurries.

“We actually had to stop running the ad because they ran out of McFlurries,” Perkins says. It probably helped that “people get hungry when they scroll,” she adds.

Perkins’ work is not mere trendspotting. She observes human behavior and makes leaps—based on what people are wearing, discussing, consuming, and thinking—to imagine where it may be headed in the future. “It’s forecasting: What’s coming, what’s next, why,” she explains. “It’s about being imaginative and willing to have conversations with people who are different from you. It’s about exploring the human psyche.”

Perkins began analyzing human behavior as a textile designer at brands like Gap and Victoria’s Secret. “I worked in the color and print department, and color and print tell you a lot about where we’re going,” she says. For example, when customers began turning away from prints after the financial crisis of 2008, she predicted that it wouldn’t take long for them to embrace uniform dressing—which happened in 2014 to 2016. Similarly, a flurry of fall and winter pastels in 2013 clued her in to an upcoming industry-wide embrace of seasonless dressing as a result of climate change. At these brands, Perkins began working on collections 18 to 24 months before their launch; and eventually, she found she liked concepting more than actually designing.

In 2014, she began working as a trend consultant for forecaster WGSN, where she learned how to figure out whether “something was going to be a thing or not.”

“There are a few tricks,” she says. One is the 3-3-3 approach: The trend should be happening in three industries, in three distinct locations, and as a response to three different macro drivers (which can be economic, political, cultural, or environmental).

Recently, Perkins has been tracking the rise of traditionalism. She first clocked it circa 2017, when prairie dresses and cottagecore had a moment, and certain subcultures that fetishized slow-living—baking sourdough bread, canning, foraging, knitting—began flourishing on the internet. But while most observers saw this shift as a cute aesthetic trend, Perkins sensed something more serious, even sinister. “People were looking at cottagecore as a fashion trend, but in reality, it was telling you where the culture was going.” The fact that independent women were flocking to the kitchen and toward “wholesome” activities was a sign that modern life had gotten too crazy, and when things get crazy, people desire simpler times. “But oftentimes that meant that women were oppressed,” Perkins says. Cut to the rise of “trad wives,” the “manosphere,” and the anti-woke brigade all calling for a return to traditional gender roles, a rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and more right-wing politics. “These are all connected,” Perkins says. And she saw it coming.

Trend-forecasting requires staying open to the world, and maintaining this stance year after year can be a challenge.

“I’m really excited by new generations of forecasters because they’re looking at it with an untrained eye and with a completely different perspective. And I think that’s needed,” she says. “When you have worked for a really long time, or you’re working in corporate life, you forget what it is like to see something from the outside. I try very hard to hold onto that.”

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Amiyra Perkins

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