Fashion trends could be predicted by data

Analysing real-time data from social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram could one day help predict fashion trends and possibly identify next celebrity designers, researchers say.
By analysing relevant words and phrases from fashion reviews, researchers were able to identify a network of influence among major designers and track how those style trends moved through the industry, said Heng Xu, associate professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State University.
Researchers analysed 6,629 runway reviews of 816 designers from Style.Com, formerly the online site for Vogue, a fashion magazine. The reviews covered 30 fashion seasons from 2000 to 2014.

Xu said her team extracted keywords and phrases from these reviews that described silhouettes, colours, fabrics and other details from each designer's collections and added them to the dataset. The researchers then created an approach to rank the designers and map influences within the group.
To evaluate the accuracy of their model, the researchers compared their network against three industry-recognised lists of influential designers and found that it closely matched these lists.
"There is no one gold standard for the most influential designers, but we believe these are a good place to start a comparison," said Xu.

While professionals in many industries are welcoming data analytics, this type of analysis may meet some scepticism from fashion designers, who view their work as a form of art and more difficult to quantify, said Yilu Zhou, associate professor of information systems, Fordham University, who worked with Xu.

"But, what we are finding from the data is that we can find footprints - there are clues - that can be traced back to individual designers," said Zhou.
The researchers said the technology could one day help industry professionals to better predict fashion trends and identify up-and-coming designers.
"We all know the big designers now, but could we use this type of technology to find out who will be the next big fashion designer and what the next big design trend is going to be?" said Zhou.
Xu said that the technology may also help consumers by helping them create wardrobes that are in their budget and are also in style.

Eventually, data scientists could analyse real-time data from social media sites, such as Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram to predict fashion styles, Xu said.