How we compute this

ARKOV diagnoses the lifecycle phase of fashion trends — it does not just chart popularity. The core distinction: hype ≠ adoption ≠ normalization. A trend can lose search interest because it is dying, or because it became so normal nobody searches for it. Telling those apart is the product.

The 7 stages

Discovery. Attention is waking from a low base — early, narrow, unproven.

Rising. Attention is climbing meaningfully faster than the fashion market as a whole.

Peak. Attention near its top after a fast run-up, with the climb stalling.

Cooling. A sustained slide off a recent high — interest is receding, year over year.

Normalized. The excitement is gone but the baseline holds: a staple, not a fad. Falling searches alone never put a trend here or out of here — that is the whole point.

Dormant. Far below its former peak with no sign of waking; residual niche presence.

Revival. A documented earlier cycle, a quiet spell, and now a fresh climb. We never call revival without prior-cycle evidence.

Sources and their roles

Google Trends (search attention, weekly, 5 years, US + state-level geography) and Wikipedia pageviews (a second, independent attention signal) power v1. Growth is always measured relative to the median of all 100 tracked trends, so a platform-wide shift in search behavior cannot masquerade as a fashion trend.

The pipeline

Raw observations → seasonal adjustment → canonical features (level vs own peak, year-over-year growth, persistence, stability, geographic breadth) → calibrated phase rules → mechanism scoring → this page's diagnosis. The narrative you read is generated fromthe structured diagnosis — it can never invent a conclusion the numbers don't hold.

What we don't know (yet)

We have no retail sell-through, no resale-sold prices, no street-style imagery, and no age demographics yet — every diagnosis lists these as explicit evidence gaps rather than guessing. Probabilities and forecasts are deliberately absent until our calibration standard says they can be trusted. Evidence strength is shown in words, not percentages.

A note on phase history

The 5-year phase strips are retrospective diagnoses: today's methodology applied to backfilled data — not what we would have said at the time. When the methodology changes, history is recomputed and versioned; it never changes silently.

Methodology v1 · monthly cadence · US market · Data source: Google Trends