NEW YORK, United States — As the Luxury Industry prepares to welcome Generation Y — the largest generation of new consumers since the Baby Boomers — Luxury Lab has just added one Tavi Gevinson to its speaker list for the upcoming Generation Next Forum.

I last heard Tavi speak at the Independent Fashion Bloggers Evolving Influence conference during New York Fashion Week, where she had the entire room enraptured with witty comments, incisive insights and a professional confidence far beyond what one might expect for a 14 year old fashion blogger. Tavi also recently participated in BoF's global livestream of the Fashion Pioneers interview with Jefferson Hack. Needless to say, at BoF we are all big fans of her Style Rookie blog and the Forum is worth attending just to hear what an extraordinarily smart 14 year old has to say about what brands mean to someone in her generation.

Speaking of brands, this week Luxury Lab also released a new ranking of Gen Y consumers "prestige" brands, measuring the affinity for 105 iconic brands, and the results were eye-opening indeed. According to Scott Galloway, founder of LuxuryLab, “Gen Y goodwill is arguably the closest thing to a crystal ball for predicting a brand's long-term prospects. Just as Boomers drove the luxury sector for the last 20 years, brands that resonate with Gen Y, whose purchasing power will surpass that of Boomers by 2017, will be the new icons of prestige.”

There was quite a bit of variation between males and females in the overall ranking, with males preferring car brands and females preferring fashion and beauty brands. But one brand resonated strongly with both sexes: Apple.

Indeed, unprompted Apple is the number one brand among men and number nine brand among women according to the survey.  And, when asked what their most likely next prestige brand purchase, the number one answer for both men and women was Apple, a testament to the primordial importance of technology to Generation Y.

In line with Jefferson Hack's comments to us the other night during Fashion Pioneers, and contrary to conventional wisdom, print is not dead for Generation Y. According to the Luxury Lab survey, print magazines continue to be an important source of information on prestige brands for Gen Y. Print is the number one source for women and number two source for men.

But of course, Generation Y has also wholeheartedly embraced social media and blogs. One in five survey respondents "like" a prestige brand on Facebook (this is the new Facebook language for being a 'fan'), and one in ten follow a prestige brand on Twitter. Almost half have signed up to receive email from a prestige brand and almost one in 5 consider blogs one of their top three sources for information on prestige brands. Detailed survey results will be presented by Scott Galloway at the Luxury Lab Generation Next Forum.

The Business of Fashion is an official media partner of the LuxuryLab Generation Next Forum, to be held in New York City on 14 May, 2010. Tickets can be purchased here.