Get ‘Em Before They’re Hot! Fads for ’91

DENVER —  Organic coffee and “retro-chic” appliances will be big hits in 1991, but the popularity of New Age religions and baseball double-headers will fade, “The American Forecaster 1991” predicts.

Other anticipated hits are “success surgery” for executives, field trips for kids and “gourmet” ice. Home videos and the Southwestern interior design style will bomb.

Kim Long, 41, of Denver, began compiling the book on what’s in and what’s out in 1983. It sells about 10,000 copies a year.

Organic coffee, grown without pesticides, “has all the makings of a major food fad,” Long said.

He predicts that the boxy appliances that marked the dawn of the post-World War II era will reappear next year. “It’s the visual appeal, so solid and heavy--the beginning of the Atomic Era,” he said.

Long says more executives will have cosmetic surgery and workers will eat at their desks so they can be more productive, signs of Americans’ intensified interest in their work.

The ideal look will be “relatively small noses, not a prominent chin, but a chinless look is unacceptable, and wrinkles would be out,” he said.

However, 1991 will not be the year for workaholics.

“I think the ‘90s is going to be a fun decade,” said Long. “Most people in the big ‘baby boom’ age group will be in their 40s and 50s. They will have earned a living and raised families. I think that equates to a potential situation where people will look to do fun things, to worry less about what the neighbors think or families think.”

A trend that has hit Japan and is expected in the United States is the popularity of “gourmet” ice. The ice, reportedly up to 10,000 years old, is chipped from Alaskan ice floes and valued for its purity.

Next year will bring a reduced interest in New Age religions: “It won’t die. But my observation is that it will just be less faddish.”

Long predicts a revival of interest in millennialism as the year 2000 approaches, generating a fascination with “crackpot religions.”

Interest in home videos, a fad that soared this year with the success of television’s “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” will also wane, Long said.

The Santa Fe fashion look, including laughing coyotes and cactus cutouts, has been over-marketed and will no longer be hip, the Forecaster says.