Machine Learning (ML) for Tracking Fashion Trends: Documenting the Frequency of the Baseball Cap on Social Media and the Runway

With the proliferation of digital photographs and the increasing digitization of historical imagery, fashion studies scholars must consider new methods for interpreting large data sets. Computational methods to analyze visual forms of big data have been underway in the field of computer science through computer vision, where computers are trained to “read” images through a process called machine learning. In this study, fashion historians and computer scientists collaborated to explore the practical potential of this emergent method by examining a trend related to one particular fashion item—the baseball cap—across two big data sets—the Vogue Runway database (2000–2018) and the Matzen et al. Streetstyle-27K data set (2013–2016). We illustrate one implementation of high-level concept recognition to map a fashion trend. Tracking trend frequency helps visualize larger patterns and cultural shifts while creating sociohistorical records of aesthetics, which benefits fashion scholars and industry alike.