Liza Kindred
Liza Kindred is the founder of fashion tech think tank Third Wave Fashion, editor of Third Wave Magazine, the world’s first print magazine dedicated to fashion tech and wearables, and the author of the upcoming O’Reilly book How We Buy Now.
Big data is changing the face of fashion
How the fashion industry is embracing algorithms, natural language processing, and visual search.
Download Fashioning Data: A 2015 Update, our updated free report exploring data innovations from the fashion industry.
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.
Solutions for a unique business problem
The majority of clothing 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, established brands and startups throughout the industry are finding clever ways to use big data to turn fashion into “bits and bytes,” as much as threads and buttons.
In the newly updated O’Reilly report Fashioning Data: A 2015 Update, Data Innovations from the Fashion Industry, we explore applications of big data that carry lessons for industries of all types. Topics range from predictive algorithms to visual search — capturing structured data from photographs — to natural language processing, with specific examples from complex lifecycles and new startups; this report reveals how different companies are merging human input with machine learning. Read more…