Postdoc Maria Mackinney-Valentin

Dr. Maria Mackinney-Valentin, postdoc, The Danish Design School.
Mackinney-Valentin’s Ph.D. dissertation On the Nature of Trends: A Study of Trend Mechanisms in Contemporary Fashion (2010) was aimed at consolidating the field of Trend Studies as an interdisciplinary area of research concerned with how and why trends in fashion change. The result was an update of the existing theory on trends coupled with a new trend model which argues that trends change according to a spatial logics as opposed to the general assumption that trends operate in temporal cycles.

Her current research adds more empirical layers to the theoretical work of the doctoral research by conducting a series of exemplary studies. One of her future ambitions is to explore whether the new model of understanding trends in spatial terms is unique to what is perceived of as the decentralized, democratized premise of fashion consumption and production in the 21st century, or whether the approach may be applicable transhistorically.