Question

Big data is important nowadays.

Write a review applying some of the concepts to the fashion industry. Offer an introduction and a summary, Conduct additional research and offer at least four additional references and citations. Offer references and at least one citation for every reference.

Answer 1

Big data is a term which you could see industries throw a lot in their conversations these days. It refers to the huge amounts of datasets - either structured or unstructured - that helps these industries to grow by making decisive insights. While one could assume that big data is important only for businesses like banking, technology, IT etc, the reality is that big data is transforming businesses in fields ranging from healthcare to the world of fashion.

In this essay, we talk about the role of big data today in the fashion industry. Big data is helping designers to change the way they make and market their products. Fashion is something that is liked by everyone in the world, but preferences of people differ across regions, age, race etc. and big data helps you devise a strategy that caters to the people of all kinds.
By collecting huge volumes of data from its customers, a company can leverage big data in the following ways:-

• Choosing the color of apparel. Colors are the first thing that gets noticed by any person in a cloth. A designer can get insights into the preferences of its customers and choose colors accordingly.
• Gender specific or gender neutral. In today's time when the discourse on gender highly influences fashion. So a designer can use data to see the trends in people's preferences using data and analyze to estimate the demand for men's, women's or gender neutral clothing.
• Pricing of Clothes. Big data can analyze the demand and supply of the products made by a fashion company. It also can help analyze the competition from other companies. Together, data can help price the garments taht are produced.
• Tapping the market for new trends. Trends are sometimes hard to follow - even for a designer sitting in a top fashion brand. Big data comes to the rescue and helps analyzing data from social media, public discourses etc to gauge new trends in fashion. These insights can help companies to create products that meet these new demands.   

Ralph Lauren, one of the leading brands of the fashion world, has shown the example of how big data can be incorporated in their business. Their PoloTech t-shirts can simultaneously work as a fitness gadget as its silver threads has sensors that can measure the wearer's movement, heartbeats, breathing rate, number of steps walked etc. The accompanying app can help customers to monitor the data collected by the t-shirt and it can suggest customized workouts for the wearer according to their fitness stats.

References:-
Ralph Lauren - Big Data in Fashion, Bernard Marr and Co, https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=717
Technology Trends in the Apparel Industry, CBI Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands
Jain S et. al, Big Data in Fashion Industry (2017), IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 254
Silva E. et al, Googling Fashion: Forecasting Consumer Behaviour Using Google Trends (2019), Social Sciences, MDPI