Text-Generated Fashion Influence Model: An Empirical Study on Style.com

Various fashion theories have been proposed to explain how fashion works and why it works that way. However, there is little research empirically examining fashion designers' influences even though the benefit of understanding this field is significant. Unlike many other innovation domains such as patents where citations are explicit, a fashion designer hardly claims that s/he is influenced by others. To trace the hidden fashion influence network, we propose a novel approach to analyze the design influence in fashion industry by comparing similarity between designers in adopting same fashion symbols. We applied this approach to 6,180 runway reviews collected from Style.com between the year of 2000 to 2014 and constructed hidden influence links and the fashion influence network. Result of our approach is compared to 11 lists of "top fashion designers." We believe this work is one of the first to empirically examine the design influence relationships among fashion designers and to visualize the design influence network. Also, this work explored the way of finding implicit links from textual review data, which may be applied to other fields as well.