text: What is the future of fashion? Tackling this question from a data-driven vision perspective, we propose to forecast visual style trends before they occur. We introduce the first approach to predict the future popularity of styles discovered from fashion images in an unsupervised manner. Using these styles as a basis, we train a forecasting model to represent their trends over time. The resulting model can hypothesize new mixtures of styles that will become popular in the future, discover style dynamics (trendy vs. classic), and name the key visual attributes that will dominate tomorrow's fashion. We demonstrate our idea applied to three datasets encapsulating 80,000 fashion products sold across six years on Amazon. Results indicate that fashion forecasting benefits greatly from visual analysis, much more than textual or meta-data cues surrounding products.
  @cite_36: We propose a novel approach for learning features from weakly-supervised data by joint ranking and classification. In order to exploit data with weak labels, we jointly train a feature extraction network with a ranking loss and a classification network with a cross-entropy loss. We obtain high-quality compact discriminative features with few parameters, learned on relatively small datasets without additional annotations. This enables us to tackle tasks with specialized images not very similar to the more generic ones in existing fully-supervised datasets. We show that the resulting features in combination with a linear classifier surpass the state-of-the-art on the Hipster Wars dataset despite using features only 0.3 of the size. Our proposed features significantly outperform those obtained from networks trained on ImageNet, despite being 32 times smaller (128 single-precision floats), trained on noisy and weakly-labeled data, and using only 1.5 of the number of parameters.1.
  @cite_41: In this paper, we analyze the fashion of clothing of a large social website. Our goal is to learn and predict how fashionable a person looks on a photograph and suggest subtle improvements the user could make to improve her his appeal. We propose a Conditional Random Field model that jointly reasons about several fashionability factors such as the type of outfit and garments the user is wearing, the type of the user, the photograph's setting (e.g., the scenery behind the user), and the fashionability score. Importantly, our model is able to give rich feedback back to the user, conveying which garments or even scenery she he should change in order to improve fashionability. We demonstrate that our joint approach significantly outperforms a variety of intelligent baselines. We additionally collected a novel heterogeneous dataset with 144,169 user posts containing diverse image, textual and meta information which can be exploited for our task. We also provide a detailed analysis of the data, showing different outfit trends and fashionability scores across the globe and across a span of 6 years.
  @cite_14: The outfits people wear contain latent fashion concepts capturing styles, seasons, events, and environments. Fashion theorists have proposed that these concepts are shaped by design elements such as color, material, and silhouette. A dress may be "bohemian" because of its pattern, material, trim, or some combination of them: it is not always clear how low-level elements translate to high-level styles. In this paper, we use polylingual topic modeling to learn latent fashion concepts jointly in two languages capturing these elements and styles. Using this latent topic formation we can translate between these two languages through topic space, exposing the elements of fashion style. We train the polylingual topic model (PLTM) on a set of more than half a million outfits collected from Polyvore, a popular fashion-based social net- work. We present novel, data-driven fashion applications that allow users to express their needs in natural language just as they would to a real stylist and produce tailored item recommendations for these style needs.
  @cite_26: We present a method to determine Fashion DNA, coordinate vectors locating fashion items in an abstract space. Our approach is based on a deep neural network architecture that ingests curated article information such as tags and images, and is trained to predict sales for a large set of frequent customers. In the process, a dual space of customer style preferences naturally arises. Interpretation of the metric of these spaces is straightforward: The product of Fashion DNA and customer style vectors yields the forecast purchase likelihood for the customer-item pair, while the angle between Fashion DNA vectors is a measure of item similarity. Importantly, our models are able to generate unbiased purchase probabilities for fashion items based solely on article information, even in absence of sales data, thus circumventing the "cold-start problem" of collaborative recommendation approaches. Likewise, it generalizes easily and reliably to customers outside the training set. We experiment with Fashion DNA models based on visual and or tag item data, evaluate their recommendation power, and discuss the resulting article similarities.
summary: Text surrounding fashion images can offer valuable side information. Tag and garment type data can serve as weak supervision for style classifiers @cite_36 @cite_41 . Purely textual features (no visual cues) are used to discover the alignment between words for clothing elements and styles on the fashion social website Polyvore @cite_14 . Similarly, extensive tags from experts can help learn a representation to predict customer-item match likelihood for recommendation @cite_26 . Our method can augment its visual model with text, when available. While text improves our forecasting, we find that text alone is inadequate; the visual content is essential.