Trend Report 2022

The dawn of the restoration era: repairing planet and people one conscious choice at a time?

We are all products of our environment. And we’re making a right mess of ours. Not just on the wider climate scale, but also domestically. I’ve even written a book drawing a direct line between our homes and our health: Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness Published as the first waves of Covid hit UK shores, but conceived way before the word pandemic had even entered the popular lexicon.

Its message was simple: what surrounds you affects you. And while many of us know this intuitively, for the scientifically inclined, there’s a Stanford University study that now proves that environment is more important than genetics in determining the strength of your immune system. All grist for the mill of intentional personal space creation. In other words, homes that reflect an occupant’s authentic likes and lives rather than being determined by anything dictated externally.

So where does this leave trends?

In truth we know that most ‘fashionable’ trends are simply manufacturer dictated ‘newness’ designed, in the loosest sense of the word, to shift product. But there are also bigger shifts that underly these seasonal fluctuations, and these are what interest me.

These are the lateral moves we make as a society (highlighted by consumer research, or early adopters) that eventually bubble up to the mainstream as potent influencing factors. These are the ‘trends’ worthy of comment.

As such, right now, sustainability is the obvious red thread connecting anything relevant for 2022.

It’s finally dawning on the majority that it’s less about the planet being in jeopardy, than us. The planet has seen worse, we have not. We are the ones in danger of extinction. But it’s not too late (just) to do something about it.