Fashion Cabal?

En and I watched an episode of Project Runway last night. It was tapes back around May of this year. In it they said something along the lines of "You have to make a collection for the fall of this year -- here's what's going to be hot then."This of course begs the question "how do you know what'll be hot in half a year?"We had a debate about this and I think that it can be boiled down to two conflicting arguments.1) The top designers are the top designers because they are good at noticing trends that are beginning before anyone else goes down that avenue. Even the top designers aren't immune to getting panned if they read things wrong. John made a fairly compelling argument for this point.2) There is a fashion designer "cabal" that gets together to decide what will be hot. It doesn't take much to make this conspiracy theory work: all you need is a few designers to be in cahoots with some fashion magazines that proclaim "this is the hot new thing." The reporting makes the reality. Ok, so I don't think a small group of designers huddle together in a dark room as the word "cabal" implies. Really it's more a factor of a small community doing group-think.I think it's a lot of 2 mixed with a little of 1.What say you?