Expert and community based style advice

Personalisation in the fashion industry is a new trend that tries to produce garments respecting the idiosyncrasy of every customer and doing so cost effectively, whilst at the same time adding value to the services provided. Typically, a personalised fashion service recognises its users, collects information about their interests, their needs, as well as their personal physical characteristics (such as body type), and subsequently recommends products based on this information.

The recommender system should be able to create and maintain efficiently user information, and this is typically performed by means of user models. There are two types of information sources that are exploited for the creation of user models in the fashion domain. The first type is in the form of generic style advice rules that are defined by fashion experts. These rules provide some guidance about the appropriate style and fit for garments for different occasions, body types, facial features, etc. The second type of information source is in the form of customer’s data which is collected by fashion oriented web sites or social networking sites; they contain users’ preferences or purchases of garments. This information can be exploited to discover important patterns that denote general user tendencies.