Fashioning Data: A 2015 Update

Chapter 1. Fashion: What Has It Done for You Lately?

When it comes to big data, maybe a lot.

Fashion is an industry that struggles for respect—despite its enormous size globally, it is often viewed as frivolous or unnecessary.

And it’s true—fashion can be spectacularly silly and wildly extraneous. But somewhere between the glitzy, million-dollar runway shows and the ever-shifting hemlines, a very big business can be found. One industry profile of the global textiles, apparel, and luxury goods market reported that fashion had total revenues of $3.05 trillion in 2011, and is projected to create $3.75 trillion in revenues in 2016.

The majority of these purchases are made not out of necessity, but out of a desire for self-expression and identity, two remarkably difficult things to quantify and define. Yet somehow myriad different businesses are finding clever ways to use big data to do just that—to turn fashion into bits and bytes, as much as threads and buttons.

In these shrewd applications of big data are lessons for industries of all types. From the lessons of a complex lifecycle to the methods of new startups, and from merging humanity with machine learning to improving visual search, the information in this report will change the way you think about the applications of big data.

So how can we turn the emotional aspects of fashion into actionable data? What can be learned from the fashion industry that differs from what is already familiar to the Strata audience? How can humans ...