Fashion For Nerds

A few scientists over at MIT have taken it upon themselves to track color trends of local fashion by rigging up cameras at numerous intersections in Cambridge that snapped pictures of passerby. The team then translated that date into a visualization of color networking, as seen above. As Grant McCracken points out in The Blog Sits… , the opportunities for this process are endless, particularly for people in the fashion industry. Editors, designers and retailers can track what trends are taking off where, and which ones are failing to catch on to the public. Or they can pick up on the trends that are starting from the street up as the focus of the industry’s attention is becoming more and more in tune with street fashion and personal style bloggers. It would be an interesting representation of the trickle-down effect of fashion, watching the trends spread from the cities to the suburbs and out across the country. I would love to see if any patterns would emerge with the relationship between color and location. Immediately I imagined a calendar of these images taken each month in each of the major fashion centers, or maps drawn out with whole regions or countries rather than just one small city.

One thing I am curious about with this particular map is, why so much red? Is it just all the students being lazy and wearing their red Harvard sweatshirts all the time? I was expecting there to be a lot more black and blue. There’s also a shocking amount of green, and it’s all concentrated in one little starburst. I wonder what that relates to. I’d love to see what more will be coming of this.

Originally written September 11, 2009