For related work, see our work on parsing clothing in images and fashion style.
Introduction
Fashion is a very subjective concept. If you ask any two people for fashion advice, you will never get any two answers. This gives in an endless amount of possibilities as garments that were once out of fashion can come back into style, or new combinations can become popular. This subjectivity is precisely what makes trying to tackle fashion with computer systems extremely complicated. It is necessary to have a more objective measure in order to be able to create fashion models that are able to predict how fashionable a certain outfit is. In this work we propose leveraging the largest fashion website chictopia.com and using the votes provided by users as a more democratic and objective measure, which allows us to design models to predict the fashionability of the outfits being worn.
Furthermore, as fashion is an ever changing concept, instead of relying on sets of rules carefully engineered by fashion experts, we use a data-driven approach in which we attempt to automatically infer the different nuances of the fashion realm. This is done by exploiting large amounts of data generated by users to teach the model, which can be constantly updated to keep in sync with the current fashion trends.
For this purpose we have collected a large dataset which we call Fashion144k formed by different posts consisting of an image with some additional information. We are able to use this dataset to create models that can understand and give fashion recommendations.
Fashion144k Dataset
We collected a total of 144,169 posts to create a dataset to be able to create our models. The posts are distributed all over the world and allow us to get a glimpse of the state of global fashion. However, the data is not uniformly distributed as seen below in the density map.
We use the votes given by users to each post as a proxy for the absolute fashionability of the post, which is something subjective that can not be directly measured. While this is not a perfect metric, it is something that allows us to teach a computer to rate and recommend fashion images. This opens up the possibility to automatic rating of outfit of the day posts, and having a personal fashion advisor in your cellphone.
We have run an analysis on the most fashionable cities in the dataset. While some results are surprising such as Manila having a very high mean fashionability, other results are in concordance to what one would think. Such as Los Angeles, Paris, New York or London being above average, and Barcelona being trendier than Madrid.
City Name | Posts | Fashionability |
---|---|---|
Manila | 4269 | 6.627 |
Los Angeles | 8275 | 6.265 |
Melbourne | 1092 | 6.176 |
Montreal | 1129 | 6.144 |
Paris | 2118 | 6.070 |
Amsterdam | 1111 | 6.059 |
Barcelona | 1292 | 5.845 |
Toronto | 1471 | 5.765 |
Bucharest | 1385 | 5.667 |
New York | 4984 | 5.514 |
London | 3655 | 5.444 |
San Francisco | 2880 | 5.392 |
Madrid | 1747 | 5.371 |
Vancouver | 1468 | 5.266 |
Jakarta | 1156 | 4.398 |
We can also do a higher level analysis and try to relate the fashionability scores with country attributes such as the mean economy and income class, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the population. It is interesting to see that sadly as expected, countries with more developed economies have larger fashionability scores. Also, in general, countries with larger populations score better on average.
Attribute | Correlation | Interpretation |
---|---|---|
Economy class | -0.137 | Countries with stronger economies tend to have more trendy inhabitants. |
Income class | -0.111 | Countries with higher mean income tend to have more fashionable inhabitants. |
log(GDP) | 0.258 | Countries with higher Gross Domestic Product tend to have more trendy inhabitants. |
log(Population) | 0.231 | Countries with larger populations tend to have more fashionable inhabitants. |
Fashion Recommendations
Of course our goal is not to propose a new dataset, but to instead leverage it to create a model that is able to understand fashion and provide fashion advice. We do this by decomposing each post into three different components: the user, the setting, and the outfit itself.
The user component attempts to capture the characteristics of each individual, such as their ethnicity, gender, etc. Not all clothing is suitable for all people. A simple example is how high heels in general are not suitable for men. The setting component attempts to capture where the picture was taken. For example wearing a suit at the beach is not something in general considered fashionable. Finally, we attempt to capture the variability of all the outfits themselves.
We believe this is an important step forward to making fashion widely available to the general population. We are very excited by this research and have plans to continue this line of work for the next years.
In the News
I am keeping a bit of track of where this is being reported. Below is a list of places that are talking about our research. Please note that these are for reference only.
Selected News
News and Tech Websites
- New Scientist
- Quartz
- Tech Times
- Mashable
- Huffington Post (UK)
- Bustle
- Wired
- Huffington Post (CA)
- Philadelphia Magazine
- AOL News
- Protein
- UPC
- Scientific Computing
- Made in Shoreditch
- Wiproo
- PSFK
- Science Daily
- Daily Mail (UK)
- GizMag
- iDigitalTimes
- TheRecord.com
- Toronto Star
- Yahoo! News (CA)
- Next Nature
Fashion Magazines (Online)
- Harper's Bazaar
- Marie Claire
- Elle
- Red Magazine (UK)
- Health Beauty Life
- Styleite
- Glamour
- Yahoo Style
- Four Seasons Recruitment
- Cosmopolitan
- Fashion Magazine
- The Pool (UK)
- FashionNotes
- Marie Claire (ZA)
- Be
- Refinery29
- wdish
International News
- Vogue (ES)
- Wired (DE)
- Jetzt (DE)
- SinEmbargo (MX)
- Nauka (PL)
- Stylebook (DE)
- Marie Claire (FR)
- Fashion Police (NG)
- Amsterdam Fashion (NL)
- Ansa (IT)
- Pluska (SK)
- Elle (NL)
- IT News (SK)
- PopSugar (AU)
- CenárioMT (BR)
- Pressetext (AT)
- La Gazzetta dello Sport (IT)
- Woman (ES)
- CSIC (ES)
- EFE (ES)
- Ara (CA)
- La Vanguardia (ES)
- El Economista (ES)
- Portal TIC (ES)
- Huffington Post (FR)
- Cinco Días (ES)
- Beep Magazine (ES)
- Stylo Urbano (BR)
- L'Economic (CA)
- Think Big (ES)
Television and Radio
- RTVE (Television, Catalan) [15:12 to 16:43]
- RTVE (Radio, Spanish) [16:10 to 20:43]