Kate Holmquistreveals the year's hottest trends
COMPETITIVE COMMUTING
The Mad Cow roundabout is for wimps. The truly ambitious will be commuting 15,000km across a dozen time zones. As urban life becomes impossibly expensive and stressful, high-status employees will work from home in tropical paradises. Apparently, jet lag has consciousness-altering advantages.
INTERIORS
Purity is replacing the funky retro look as this year's trend. Luxurious modernism will be about emphasising clean lines but with gorgeous materials - as green and sustainable as possible. Unpainted, matt-finished woods, stone and leather will be key, but everything must also be easy to clean, for busy lives. Gentle earth tones, blues and greens are in. New-builds and renovations should be energy-saving and eco-friendly yet still have flat-screen TVs, and tiny MP3-based stereo systems, everywhere.
You'll be forgiven for thinking you're in rehab rather than a spa in the cutting-edge destinations. It's goodbye pampering and hello purging in the new temples of detox. "Spaficionados" are snubbing the humble facial and massage in favour of uncomfortable treatments that promise to rid the body of emotional baggage. The boot-camp atmosphere is quite bracing, too.
TRAVEL
Safaris in Kenya have replaced Disneyland as the most enviable family destination, and Dubai is hot, too, but the hottest destination is Mexico City, which specialises in everything naco - which means tacky or trashy. Bono stays at the Condesa DF Hotel, as does the director Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose film Babel was named best drama at this year's Golden Globes and helped to popularise the city. Mexican art is so in that it won't be cheap for much longer.
SPIRITUALITY
Everybody's talking about "The Secret", a new-age philosophy that claims all you need to make your dreams come true is to become aligned to the cosmos, then "ask, believe, receive". The Secret is also a DVD and a book that have made their creator, an Australian named Rhonda Byrne, a millionaire.
SPENDING
Goodbye bran, hello moral fibre: it has finally become possible to be too rich and too thin. Conscientious consumerism has replaced conspicuous consumption. Clothes have to be made from fair-trade cotton and shoes made from the skin of cows that were fed eco-friendly diets. Shirts made of hemp and dresses made from the silk of organically farmed silkworms make you look pure, as long as you keep the extravagant cost to yourself. Entertaining has to be low-key and green, even if the shellfish and organic vegetables you serve cost a bomb.
CARS
If you don't know your carbon-dioxide-emissions level in grams per kilometre, don't even bother to go out. Hybrids are the coolest cars now, as they run on petrol and electricity (and no, you don't have to plug them in). Also very cool are cars that run on E85, a form of bioethanol. There was one E85 pump in Ireland a year ago; now there are 14. For pure style, as well as function, it has to be a four-door coupe, such as the Mercedes CLS-Class, a sleek sports car with a seat in the back for the kids.
FAMILY
Children - and the more the better - are the new status symbols. Not only do they justify that seven-seater SUV, but they show you're fertile and rich. To care for them, Manhattan's elite are hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies, because they want their offspring to speak posh Chinese. This is so the children, after graduating from Harvard Business School, will be able to do business in Shanghai, which is set to outstrip the US and Europe in economic importance this century.
DRUGS
If the legalise-drugs lobby have their way, we could all be in for the new Californian taste treat: "Potella" is like Nutella with a bit of cannabis added - for medicinal purposes only. Also widely available in the US, according to Rolling Stone magazine, are branded hash lollipops and chocolate-chip cookies.
MUSIC
Cool, unintrusive music that blends with the earthy, soothing tones of the natural interior. (We didn't say wallpaper music, did we?) Norah Jones, Diana Krall and Corinne Bailey Rae soothe the stressed-out commuter generation, while Amy Winehouse reminds them they're still alive.