Your Search Results Have Turned Google Into an Authority on Fashion Trends

I’d love to take a look sometime at a Google company directory. I’m sure one of you has a copy lying around somewhere. Does it resemble a phone book? I bet it’s like a phone book. Printed out it’d be the size of the yellow pages.

What fascinates me by this prospect is that Google likely boasts the most amusing and myriad array of job titles out of any company in the world. Think of a random job title and there’s a chance Google employs someone in that position. Like “senior cookie specialist.” I’d like to be Google’s senior cookie specialist. I should keep an eye out in case it opens up…

The impetus for this very thoughtful introduction was an article from yesterday by PC World‘s Chandra Steele. It’s all about how search results have turned a team of Google data scientists into the world’s foremost authority on fashion trends. Steele explains:

“Google has amassed quite the database on all things fashion (6 billion queries, to be exact), which it has used to produce its Spring 2015 U.S. Fashion Trends Report.

From a fashion industry perspective, the trends of spring 2015 are denim-on-denim, culottes, and fringe, fringe, fringe.

But this is at odds with what Google has found people are searching for, according to Google’s Fashion Data Scientist Olivier Zimmer and Fashion Brand Strategist Yarden Horwitz.”

“Fashion data scientist.” That totally could have been one of those made-up job titles from above. I imagine the fashion data scientist has lunch in the commissary with the senior cookie specialist. The rubber ducky trends analyst takes her lunch at her desk, naturally.

You can explore the report (linked again down below) and learn all about the neat research methods the fashion team used to track trends via the aforementioned 6 billion search queries. The report identifies several trends categorized by whether they’re “slowly rising though here to stay” or “spiking now and bound to disappear in a flash.” On the other side of the coin, you can see which trends are plummeting in popularity versus those on a slow and steady decline. Spoiler alert: If you’re heavily invested in palazzo pants, you can breathe a sigh of relief. If your closet is full of vintage clothing, it may be time to visit the consignment store while you still can.

The report goes in-depth in many other different categories — trends are tracked for skirts, shorts, denim, dresses, etc. It’s all the fascinating result of heavy data crunching to offer an analytic alternative to the conjecture offered by other outlets. Whether it’s all that useful to someone looking for fashion advice, well, I’ll leave that to someone who isn’t wearing the same clothes he wore in high school.

Then again, I’m not going to hesitate to scan this report for business attire advice as soon as I land my big interview for the open senior cookie specialist job.

Read more at PC Mag and check out Google’s Spring 2015 U.S. Fashion Trends Report.

Below, OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder offers a frank stance on data ownership: 

Photo credit: Devin_Pavel / Shutterstock