Styles in the fashion social network: An analysis on lookbook.nu

Abstract

As birds of a feather flock together, so do people with similar interests and preferences befriend with each other. Numerous Social Network Analysis (SNA) researchers have investigated how individuals’ identification affects their behaviors, such as ethnicity, education, political opinions and even musical tastes. What about one’s fashion style? These days, online social networks provide rich resources for us to study these phenomena; however, no research has investigated people’s styles/tastes within a social network. In this paper, we analyze the largest fashion social network, Lookbook.nu. By applying SNA techniques, we answer whether people with similar styles tend to connect with each other on the online social networks and whether people form communities based on their styles. We believe this is the first work studying people’s fashion styles on an online social network empirically.