  Goods, styles, ideologies are adopted by society through various mechanisms.
In particular, adoption driven by innovation is extensively studied by
marketing economics. Mathematical models are currently used to forecast the
sales of innovative goods. Inspired by the theory of diffusion processes
developed for marketing economics, we propose, for the first time, a predictive
framework for the mechanism of fashion, which we apply to first names. Analyses
of French, Dutch and US national databases validate our modelling approach for
thousands of first names, covering, on average, more than 50% of the yearly
incidence in each database. In these cases, it is thus possible to forecast how
popular the first names will become and when they will run out of fashion.
Furthermore, we uncover a clear distinction between popularity and fashion:
less popular names, typically not included in studies of fashion, may be driven
by fashion, as well.
