Trends used to arrive in Kuwait by suitcase.

There was a route, and you could follow every step of it. A student comes home from London or Boston at the start of summer. The bag opens. The watch goes on a wrist. The whole school sees it in September. The shops order it by winter. Everyone is bored of it by spring, and then the next flight lands.

One year, start to finish, and you knew exactly where to stand for each part.

The arrivals hall

You get there early. There is a metal fence, and you stand behind it, or on it if you are short enough to need the extra height, which I wasn’t.

And then there are the doors. Automatic, always shut, opening only when somebody walks out. Which means for two hours you are watching a door, and every time it slides open you get about four seconds of the inside. Luggage belts. People pushing trolleys. And somewhere in there, maybe, the person you came for.

So, you are scanning. Not for a face. For evidence.

The oversized colourful watch. The Hawaiian shirt. The Oakleys. The Sony Discman with the headphones still around the neck from the plane. The gold-brushed jeans. Something new to Kuwait.

Every time those doors close you feel one step closer to The Secret. The سبق صحفي you are going to walk into school with the next day.

Then out they come. You hug them. You kiss them. And the whole time, in the back of your head, what is it? What did you bring? Please let it be the watch. Please let it be those strange DKNY sandals, and yes, I will take them, I do not care that they have spent nine hours on a sweaty foot.

All for the sake of being trendy.

The ride home

This is where it splits.

If it is a brother, brace yourself. Because his friends came to the airport too. They are already at the car, and there are hugs and shouting, and somebody says يالله نمر ديوانية على طول, and that is that.

He goes with them. You return with the bags.

Demoted from little brother to unpaid airport-to-home delivery service. A service that did not exist back then, and costs a fortune today.

If it is a sister, the whole ride home is yours. You show her everything that has changed in Kuwait, which is usually one new monument/statue or one new billboard on the airport road at the كوع.

You mention new restaurants in Kuwait or sandwiches or gifts that are given by restaurants, but she has just spent nine months eating better versions of all of them.

Your last card is Hardee’s. The cookies. The roast beef and cheese. Because a lot of them came back ديّن and had stopped eating non-halal beef over there, which makes Hardee’s technically news.

She is not impressed. And you are still thinking about the bag.

Home, and the queue

You go inside and wait for the hugs and the kisses, which are not for you. They are for the maids, who have also been waiting, because they know what is coming. The duty-free fake gold watches and the cheap colognes.

Then the bedroom. Then lying flat on the bed. Then the long theatrical aaahhh, home sweet home.

You do not care. You want the bag.

And if it was the brother, the wait gets worse, because he is at that diwaniya now, saying hello to some friends, and you know exactly how that goes. By the time anyone remembers the suitcase it is past curfew, and you are being sent to bed.

No bag opening tonight.

But the moment comes

Same day or the next, it comes. Bag opening day.

It is a Steve Jobs keynote. It is a Marvel trailer dropping at Comic-Con. Everyone in the room. Nobody sitting down.

It starts with the sweets, which have all melted somewhere over Europe and need an hour in the fridge, which stops nobody, and now half of them gone and there is chocolate on somebody’s face.

And every single one comes with a story. This is the limited-edition Skittles, they only came out this year, they sold out in the first week and you could not find them anywhere. This is Wispa Gold. This is Time Out. We drove to a WHSmith in another city because ours had run out. This was the last one left in the airport.

And every item in that bag is already limited, because whatever came out of it is the entire national supply. Nobody is restocking. There is no second delivery. Once it is eaten, it is gone until the next flight.

Then the colognes. Always a CK. Always that same citrus thing. Always in the square bottle that looked like a flask, which somebody in the room would inevitably point out looked like a flask.

I never understood the colognes.

Then the clothes. Shirts, trousers, shoes. Always one size off.

Then the best part

The stationery.

Warner Brothers from the studio store, themed on that summer’s film. Looney Tunes. Space Jam. Batman.

The film that would not reach Kuwait for another two months, and which you had already heard about from whoever drove to Bahrain to watch it uncut.

That was not going in a drawer until next year. That was going to school the next morning. That was the entire point.

I am trendy. I know things. I know things before you do.

And then the watch

Which is not a gift for anybody. That one is theirs.

The Swatch Skin. Or the Baby-G in a colour nobody here had seen yet. Or, a few years later, one of those TechnoMarines with the rubber strap.

If you are very lucky, and very persistent, and you time your request for a moment when they are in an unusually good mood, you get one afternoon with it. One. You go straight outside, find your friends, and spend the entire time holding your arm in positions no human arm has ever naturally been in, waiting for somebody to notice.

Then the second wave

Because now everybody knows.

By July the whole country has seen it, and the whole country is flying out. London, Boston, Paris, Geneve, Marbella, wherever. And they all come back at the end of the summer with the same bag.

Same watch. Same shirt. Same sunglasses. Same sweets still melted. Same stationery, except now it is a different film, because the summer moved on while we were all still talking about the last one.

Small differences. A new colour of the same watch. A different Looney Tunes character on the pencil case. But it is the same bag, opened in a hundred living rooms in the same week.

So, September is the strange month. Everyone arrives at school with it, and nobody is impressed anymore, because everyone has one.

Except the few who did not travel. And that is when the shops appear.

The retailers have noticed by now, and they have rushed an order in as fast as they possibly can, and it turns up in a display case in Salmiya at a price with no relationship to anything. Triple, easily. Sometimes more. And people pay it, because the alternative is being the only one without.

Even the chocolate shows up. The same bar that arrived in a suitcase in June is suddenly on a shelf in a supermarket in November, imported, at four times what it costs in a corner shop in London. And it sells.

So, you end up with three tiers of the same object. The one that came in the bag. The one everybody brought back in August. And the one somebody’s father paid a fortune for in a shop in Kuwait, for the same thing.

Then the orders keep coming. Another shipment. Another one. Until the shelves are full and nobody wants it, because it has been on every wrist in the country for eight months.

And then the sale sign goes up. Thirty percent. Then fifty. Then it is in a basket near the till, and nobody looks at it twice, and eight months ago it was the most important object in the country.

And then it is May again, and someone is standing at the fence at the airport, watching a door.

And now it is gone

There was a pattern, and everybody knew it. Where trends came from, who carried them, when they landed, how long they lasted. And the delay worked as a filter. Anything that made it into that bag had already survived a full year somewhere else.

Now there is no pattern. There is a two-syllable named influencer telling you what to buy, and a different one telling somebody else something completely different, and everyone is following a different person.

So, there is no trend anymore. Not a real one. Nothing everybody sees at the same time. Just a few thousand people each being sold something separately by whoever they happen to follow, in exchange for a cut.

No journey. No story. No year of waiting.

Just a discount code.