Fashion: And soon to be seen in your local high street: Solstice at Glastonbury: a cosmic event, a music event and - just wait and see - a fashion event. Marion Hume reports

NEW AGE travellers, already an enormous influence on the dress sense of the establishment they have chosen to eschew, are the fashion story of the summer, in spite of themselves.

Last week, after years of being viewed by the chic and stylish as a place never to muddy one's Manolo Blahnik heels, the Glastonbury festival took over from the King's Road, from Carnaby Street of old, and from the London designer scene as the place to be.

The fashion folk dressed down and mingled - with those nomads who managed not to be diverted by the police into distant lay-bys, as well as with those weekend grungers who have adopted the nomads' mismatched looks without the inconvenience of life on the road.

But the fashion folk - designers, fashion photographers and representatives of the massive high street fashion chains - weren't there for fun; they had an agenda. They weren't there to record the existence of a group of people whose very presence is a criticism of the current situation in this country, nor were they there out of anthropological interest in this latest manifestation of tribal lifestyle. Instead, they were there to capture, to absorb and to be inspired by the odd-ball mixing of clothes, the jumble of styles, the hair and accessories of groups of people who would spit on the very idea of being fashionable.

But fashionable they are. The prediction houses - international companies that feed trend information to big store groups here, in Japan, in the United States and throughout Europe - have been watching the travelling phenomenon for a couple of years. While gilt buttons and Chanel-style suits were still de rigueur in the shops, trend agencies were putting together mood boards, lectures and slide shows that included images of the travellers for their clients, who include high street chains, textile mills, clothing manufacturers, cosmetic companies, even car manufacturers. Clients then use this information on how the mass market will move in terms of colour, fabric, texture and style to gear up for coming demands.

Li Edelkoort, whose Paris-based Studio Edelkoort is recognised as the most advanced prediction agency, has been promoting fashion looks based on British poverty, life on the road and sleeping rough for five years. Promostyl, another Paris- based trend bureau, has been showing images of new nomadism to clients for two years.

'We started seeing it coming with the breaking down of the Berlin Wall, the fusion of east and west that started people moving. Then we started telling our clients that it would become a major trend, even though the police were still hoping that it wouldn't do so,' says Kim Mannino, the director of Promostyl's British bureau.

Nigel French, the London-based predictions and marketing agency, says it has been telling clients about New Age travellers for two years.

'We pointed out to them that they expressed the Zeitgeist of rebellion,' says Sue Evans, creative head of the agency's womenswear. All agree that the trend is about to peak, 'but although the high street retailers often work very far ahead, they can also get clothes out on a six-week turnround, and so could have seen ideas at Glastonbury that will be in shops across the country by mid-August,' says Ms Evans.

So what next? The prediction agencies, which are currently working on trend books for 1995, can already tell us where we will be in summer 1994 - St Tropez.

The uber-model and still-rumoured future princess of Monaco, Claudia Schiffer, who started her career dubbed as the new Bardot, has, fittingly, chosen to live in the French resort. So next summer, those in search of the fashion Zeitgeist can throw off this year's cunning disguise of monkey boots, yards of ethnic fabric sarongs and dreadlocks attached to their hats and trade them all in for the south-of-France uniform of a string bikini.

Meanwhile, the New Age nomads will go out of fashion, where they never intended to be in the first place, and become 100 per cent anti-establishment once more.

(Photographs omitted)