How Technology Can Be Applied To Fashion And Other Things I Wish I Would've Known
Based on my experience.
Even though the fashion industry has made significant strides in adopting and leveraging technology, fashion and technology are still commonly seen as two conflicting fields that are unlikely to intersect.
And I get it—fashion and tech can feel like the antithesis to each other. One is rooted in subjectivity and artistry, the other in objectivity and numbers. The former is quite female-dominated, the latter is overwhelmingly male-dominated.
Closing the fashion-tech gap is also not helped by the fact that there is a very defined idea and archetype for who a software engineer, or “tech bro”, is. Just think of the capsule wardrobe that made Steve Jobs so recognizable: his signature black turtleneck, denim, and dad sneakers combo. The modern-day “tech bro” has swapped the turtleneck for a hoodie, but the formula is relatively the same. And, this archetype doesn’t typically include having interest in or knowledge of fashion.
This hyper-restrictive image often deters others, who exist outside of it, from seeing technology as a field they can pursue or succeed in. I certainly felt deterred. After scoring a C in the first, super-male-dominated college computer science class I ever took, I decided to ditch my software-engineer-dreams altogether. I switched my major to economics.
Never mind that struggling in computer science classes is normal, and that there’s actually no strong correlation between GPA and future success, leadership ability, or creativity. Or, that women are actually naturals at computer science. But alas.
One semester of economics later, I switched my major back to computer science. And while struggling in coding and linear algebra classes, I thought to myself this is it, this is computer science. It exists in Silicon Valley and in Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft. I thought, probably, this couldn’t possibly intersect with fashion. I’m happy to have been wrong.
APPLYING TECH TO FASHION
During my first year of college, I took an introductory coding class which taught us how to scrape public posts from Twitter (do I need to call it X now?) and analyze the positivity of their language. A sentiment analysis is a common process in data science where a computer is trained to recognize whether a block of text is positive, negative, or neutral. It’s an interesting way to take something quite subjective, like language and tone, and turn it into something objective.
And because this was in 2016, when the United States was headed towards a Presidential election, we were taught this Twitter-scraping-and-sentiment-analysis skillset as a means of assessing public approval for each presidential candidate.
Years later, when I was ideating new ways to analyze fashion trends on Data, But Make it Fashion, I decided to apply this very same technical concept to, rather than analyzing the popularity of two political candidates, gauge interest between ballet flats versus sneakers. Or low-rise jeans versus high-rise jeans. Or Prada versus Miu Miu.
For instance, if I analyze a Tweet that says “I love Prada”, a computer will identify the word love is a positive one, and declare the sentence positive. If the Tweet says “I hate Prada”, a computer will arrive at the opposite conclusion. For the record, I love Prada, and the data says most people do, too.
Then, using Python code, I can do this—scrape online posts and analyze their average sentiment—at a very large scale, on thousands upon thousands of posts mentioning any trends I can think of, in just a couple of seconds. Today, this methodology is still an important part of the analyses I post on Data, But Make it Fashion.
SEEMS PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD?
The Twitter-sentiment-analysis example isn’t an isolated case. Many foundational concepts of coding and technology can be applied to fashion-related use cases, even if they aren’t overtly written in such a way. You just have to get a little creative.
Take a look at the data structures practice problems on HackerRank.com, an online site where you can explore and learn coding for free. The first problem involves reversing elements in an array, which is a list of items you can store in your code. To solve the problem, you need to take an array that contains the elements [x, y, z], and reverse them into [z, y, x]. Seems pretty plain and simple.
But, what if we thought about it differently, and more fashion-forward-ly? What if the array actually contains a list of items for sale on Prada.com, like [Cotton_Shirt, Leather_Skirt, Single_Breasted_Jacket], sorted in the order of most to least expensive? Our job, then, is to reverse the list and put it in the order of least to most expensive.
This might seem silly, but is actually a real-life fashion-tech problem. What do you think happens when you go online shopping and sort products by their price? This data structures problem is essentially what’s going on in the background.
So, when exploring how to apply technology to fashion, you don’t necessarily need to start somewhere new and unheard of. It can be a good idea to build off technological concepts you already know and are familiar with, or whatever you’re learning at the time, and imagine how they’d fit into a fashion-related context. More often than not, you’ll find it’s possible. And then, you can build off there.
WHY NOT BEING A “TECH BRO” IS A GOOD THING
Being able to connect dots across seemingly unrelated topics—like applying technical coding problems to the fashion industry or other fields like sports, entertainment, law—is also an incredibly valuable skillset.
I recently finished reading David Epstein’s “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. It gave a great overview on how collecting a breadth of knowledge across several different and unrelated areas can often be more useful to innovation than focusing on depth within one, specific space.
For example, an excerpt from the book reads:
“‘I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.’“
Similarly, finding my space within fashion-tech wasn’t about coming up with some new, revolutionary technology to disrupt the fashion industry from the inside-out. It was about connecting the dots between tech concepts that were tried and true with something outside of technology. Like fashion trends.
Then, having interests outside of computer science—and that differ with what’s imagined for a “tech bro”—is a good and valuable thing. These differences aren’t weaknesses, but rather can be the very tools that allow you to open doors in tech you didn’t think were there and that others, lacking your distinct knowledge, might have overlooked.
IN CONCLUSION…
Fashion companies are businesses at the end of the day. Businesses that launch products, market those products, operate a supply chain, launch websites, launch mobile apps, have email distribution lists, use data to understand which products are best sellers, use more data to personalize a consumer’s experience. And so on. Businesses that, like most others, need technology.
And ultimately, succeeding in technology—and in fashion-tech—is not necessarily about how closely you fit the “tech bro” image, but about how well you can connect the dots across disparate fields to build something interesting and useful, or solve business problems, in innovative ways that perhaps hadn’t been considered.
So, if you find yourself sticking out in computer science, or not fitting in among crowds of “tech bros”? Or, if you have a lot of other interests that seem totally unrelated to computer science? Good. You’ll probably be really great at it.
I love you on IG, and now even more on Substack - so good to learn new experiences! I also have a very different uni background not that common to my work field, but passion and creativity can take you long ways :)
The inspiration I needed for this year🤘🏽