The submission I chose to reverse engineer for this week’s post is Robots Reading Vogue. I found this one to be the most fascinating because it is attempting to break down the design and art that makes up fashion and fashion publications into statistical analysis from cold, hard data.
This project attempts to turn designs, colours, styles of clothing, ads and writing styles into quantitive data that illustrate numerous trends that the reader can draw from Vogue magazine. To put this all together, students and faculty from Yale University used the Vogue archive and collected the data they wanted to focus on starting from issues from 1892.
The project can be further broken down into 9 different parts that are clearly shown on the website. They used a variety of tools to examine the memo style of the editor of chief Diana Vreeland, analytics on fabric materials, the hue and saturation of colours used, and marketing stats on various brands. For presenting their findings, they used a variety of sliding scales, video clips and tables.
I really thought the memo generator was exceptionally done. It’s a very unique concept and it’s amazing they could capture her writing style and choice words well enough to the point they can even regenerate new memos. The presentation of the page is also very well done. The history is brief, but informative. The background on Vreeland is also very interesting and is a nice homage to her. The graphic used to display the memos is also fitting as it gives off the vintage feel to match the information given in the text.
Another segment that really stood out to me and is integral to analyzing fashion and Vogue is the table showing the frequency of features for brands throughout the years. It’s great they also separated the brands into categories as well. Using the tables and graphs that have been compiled, one can easily see which brands were doing well at what period of time. When combined with the other segments found on the website, such as information about colours and materials, one can go into a deep analysis and dig deep into the trends and what was “in” during a time period.
Overall, I really enjoyed this presentation put together by the Yale faculty and students. The overall presentation of the website is clean, crisp and clear and the material is presented in a concise way that is still interesting.
I didn’t reverse engineer the same project, but I really enjoyed reading your analysis on Robots Reading Vogue. I totally agree that it is quite fascinating that people were able to breakdown data on art and fashion and make it into statistical analysis. I agree that the memo generator was exceptional because it is not commonly seen or even done. Although the history is in fact brief, I still found it to be very informative and interesting to look at.