New York Fashion Week 2015: Can Scientists Use Instagram To Identify Budding

They were particularly interested in number of comments and likes, the frequency of posts, and the tone of posts and comments. The algorithm is based on data from the Fashion Model Directory and models’ Instagram profiles. A team of researchers from United States found out that the factors such as waist size, shoe size, hips and size of dress do not have to do anything with success. Of the seven predicted to score lowest in popularity, six were also accurately identified. Popularity was defined as the number of runways new model walked in during the Fall/Winter 2015 season. Here they found that buzz on social media could help predict their success on the runway, too.

From there, the IU group mixed in statistics from each model’s Instagram account: number of followers, how many posts per month, comments and likes.

“Our framework successfully predicts most of the new popular models who appeared in 2015”.

To test the method to predict a model’s popularity, the researchers narrowed their focus to 15 models listed on the Fashion Model Directory as “new faces”. The six models as spotted by the framework for 2015 were Arina Levchenko, Melanie Culley, Phillipa Hemphrey, renata Scheffer, Sofia Tesmenitskaya and Sasha Antonowskaia.

“Social media is changing the game dramatically”, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and an assistant research scientist at the IU Network Science Institute, said in a statement. This means that out of the 8 models that they picked as the most popular, 6 of them were actually extremely successful in their run for the upcoming New York Fashion Week. “Various factors positively correlate with runway popularity-for example, tall models are more popular and each additional centimeter of height more than doubles their chances of walking a runway”, an article in Technology Review explains.

Study authors added there are 20 top modeling agencies in the world that can greatly contribute to a model’s success, and Instagram should be considered as important as those agencies to that success. An above the average number of likes was able to lower these odds by 10 percent, but the researchers couldn’t tell for sure why.

The team also found that the majority of new models do not walk any runway, with only 24 per cent given the opportunity, most likely owing to strong bias toward established models. He goes to point out that Kendall Jenner is a ideal example of this.

The study will be presented at the 19th Association for Computing Machinery conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, taking place February 27 to March 2, 2016 in San Francisco.