Beauty, they say, is never out of fashion, even if fashion trends change every season. Now it seems that Instagram is quite good at predicting who the next top model is going to be.
It can do that by using the information about fashion models that it collected last autumn. A team of experts from Indiana University made this possible, by having the platform use the physical and personal information about these women to tell with an accuracy of about 80 percent who the most popular models will be.
This popularity is determined largely by the number of runway walks a new model took part in during the Fall and Winter season in 2015.
First of all, the experts looked at the statistics collected by the Fashion Model Directory and recorded the models’ eye and hair color, as well as height, waist, hip, shoe and dress size.
Secondly, they took a look at the agencies that had employed them. Those who worked for top agencies had much higher chances of becoming popular than the ones working for smaller agencies.
Then they analyzed their Instagram profiles, recording the number of positive and negative posts, comments and likes they got.
The researchers believed that those who were more active on their Instagram pages stood a much higher chance to become famous. Social media has a very important role in putting them on the map and increase their popularity. The higher their number of posts, likes and comments, the higher their likelihood to be famous. Thus, models who had a lot of posts could increase their popularity by as much as 15 percent.
Obviously, physical traits mattered very much as well, even if they are not the most important elements that determine success. Therefore, those who were even an inch taller stood a two times higher chance of walking a runway. Those who had smaller shoe size, dress, waist and hip sizes also increased their popularity.
“When we added the social information, we realized that we will be able to predict with above 80 percent accuracy whether a new face, a new model that just started … would become popular, would run some top runway in the immediate future,” said lead study author Emilio Ferrara, who is a computer scientist at the University of Southern California.
After they set off to test Instagram’s forecasting abilities, the researchers only selected fifteen models for the formula to focus on. They predicted eight of them would become most popular and six of them met these predictions, while six out of seven who the experts thought would not be popular,indeed weren’t.
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