The Rise of Fashion Informatics: A Case of Data-Mining-Based Social Network Analysis in Fashion

With the advent of modern cognitive computing technologies, fashion informatics researchers contribute to the academic and professional discussion about how a large-scale data set is able to reshape the fashion industry. Data-mining-based social network analysis is a promising area of fashion informatics to investigate relations and information flow among fashion units. By adopting this pragmatic approach, we provide dynamic network visualizations of the case of Paris Fashion Week. Three time periods were researched to monitor the formulation and mobilization of social media users’ discussions of the event. Initial textual data on social media were crawled, converted, calculated, and visualized by Python and Gephi. The most influential nodes (hashtags) that function as junctions and the distinct hashtag communities were identified and represented visually as graphs. The relations between the contextual clusters and the role of junctions in linking these clusters were investigated and interpreted.