There’s an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal (thanks, Sonia!) about those elusive and enviable folks known as trend spotters. What a dream job: get paid to travel the world, specifically during hot arts and culture festivals to observe and compile reports on what’s going to be hot in the near future of retail. The article, entitled “Spotting the Next Hoodie,” follows a couple of these trend spotters around, and I was happily cruising through it until I was stopped by how it ends:

This week, WGSN’s Ms. Job sorted through more than 400 pictures she took in Austin, putting together groupings of three to six shots that illustrate a trend for her “trend flashes” — short reports that she will produce once a week for the next three weeks. In addition to high-waisted jeans, which she has noticed since at an H&M store in New York, she plans to focus on Ray-Ban Wayfarer-style sunglasses and the trapper-style raccoon hat that several young women were wearing.

Next stop: Portland, Ore.

TA-DUM! First, is it just me or is the fact that it ends with that last line as its own paragraph, punctuating the entire article seem pretty loaded? Secondly, I’m assuming that the trip to Austin was around SXSW, which means this trend spotter who was headed here could be here right now. Or hey, she could have come and gone already. Either way, what do you think she reported after observing PDX street style?