The Cool Hunters.

Do you know how companies like Nike and J. Crew figure out fashion's next big thing? By watching you very, very carefully.

Do you take shopping seriously? Love to spend hours at the mall with your friends, cruising the stores, checking out what other kids are wearing?

Businesses such as Nike, J. Crew, Wet Seal-Contempo, and Delia's hire scouts--or spies--to watch you, talk to you, and pay careful attention to what you wear and what you don't wear. Their mission: to find out what's hot and what's not.

Reebok, for example, sends so-called cool hunters into the field every few months with samples of new shoes to find out which ones kids like best. They stake out malls and city streets, and talk to kids about the features they like most.

CRYSTAL-BALL GAZING

There are also market-research companies that try to supply a crystal ball. They charge as much as $20,000 a year for reports that claim to predict what teens are going to buy six months or a year from now whether, for example, baggy pants will still be popular next fall.

They base their predictions on interviews with the coolest kids they can find in cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Researchers ask hundreds of kids to fill out questionnaires about not only clothing and accessories, but also about what they like to eat and drink and what they like to do in their free time.

You may not want to hear this, but researchers even have a system of categorizing teens by their trendiness. The kids who embrace fashion trends early on and attract other teens are called "influencers." Also known as "early adopters," these particularly cool kids are the first to pick up ideas from "innovators"--people whose definition of cool is doing something nobody else is doing.

"Edge" kids are the ones who constantly change their look, consider themselves to be anti-fashion, and drop trends as soon as the influencers pick them up. "Conformers," who follow the trends once they're established, are the majority.

Does this fashion anthropology make sense? It does financially. Selling clothing, cosmetics, and other fashion items to teenagers is big business--more than $4 billion in 1998. Given the huge amount of money at stake, for clothing manufacturers and other companies with high teen appeal, cool is crucial.