Composite images of Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta Spring/Summer 2012, Rodarte Spring/Summer 2012 via New York Magazine Fashion

According to EDITD, the London-based startup that uses online data to measure and predict fashion trends, Jacobs not only bested other notable designers when it comes to online buzz, but both his main line and Marc by Marc Jacobs secondary line placed in the top 10. The company analyzed 300,000 NYFW tweets and updates with an emphasis on the social media savvy who were actually at the shows.

There are pretty heavy rumors flying that Jacobs is in line for John Galliano’s old job at Dior, and due to days lost during Hurricane Irene meant that the Marc Jacobs closed New York Fashion Week, so the extra bit of publicity and timing could have played a role.

In order, the top 10 most buzzed about shows were

1. Marc Jacobs (nearly 323,000 followers)
2. Alexander Wang (~28,500 followers)
3. Prabal Gurung (~34,000 followers)
4. Michael Kors (~301,000 followers)
5. Jason Wu (~6,500 followers)
6. Rodarte (no official Twitter account)
7. Marc by Marc Jacobs
8. Diane von Furstenberg (~281,000 followers)
9. Rag & Bone (~26,000 followers)
10. Oscar de la Renta (~83,000 followers)

What’s interesting to note is that it seems that the number of followers didn’t always have an impact on a brand’s buzz. While the Marc Jacobs company account leads the other brands’ in raw follower numbers, relatively small accounts like Alexander Wang, Rag & Bone, Jason Wu and even those without a presence (Rodarte) still commanded a healthy amount of online attention.

We’re assuming this simply comes down to who’s tweeting being nearly as important as how many are tweeting.

Beyond the individual shows, it looks like certain trends resonated with those following the fashion action online. Feminine, retro and minimal styles were most buzzed about. When it comes to patterns – which were out in abundance at many shows, floral prints took the top spot; but if you bought into the stripes that dominated Prada and Marc Jacobs prints this summer, hang onto those pieces because stripes weren’t too far behind as the 2nd most buzzed about pattern. In spite of the frequency with which they occurred on fall runways, and how often you might see them popping up on red carpets, dots and spots only came in at number 5.

The entire New York Fashion Week trend brief is available at EDITD.

EDITD tracks trends from inspiration to actual sales

EDITD, a London based startup, has raised $1.6 million from the same VC firm that invested in fashion success stories like Net-a-Porter and ASOS to do something substantially different in fashion trend monitoring. {TechCrunch Europe}

Fashion trend forecasting is a big business; the Telegraph estimates that it’s $36 billion big, in fact. For the last few years though, it’s been a market dominated by two major players. A quick search will turn up conversations from people who’ve worked with both debating which has the easier interface or better image archive, but it’s typically the details that differentiate the sites.

WGSN made waves by moving trend forecasting from books to online reports and briefings: an early version of fashion in “the cloud,” if you will. That shift made the two brothers who founded the company millionaires when they sold the company for £140 million in 2005 – roughly $245 million at historical exchange rates. If you’re wondering what makes the company, who many outside of the  fashion and retail industry have never heard of, worth so much, it’s probably the fact that upwards of 30,000 business pay $30,000 per year for access to WGSN’s photos, reports and forecasts. Stylesight has emerged as a lower priced alternative, but essentially offers very similar services.

Which is obviously serving a market need, but aside from changes to the interface to accommodate growing volumes of information, not much has changed since WGSN first launched in 1997 even though the rest of the industry has.

“Digital subscription services are the holy grail both in business to business and consumer publishing, but why does the fashion industry, which is built on its own creativity, pay considerable annual sums for ‘forecasting’, which is not data-driven or scientifically proven?” the author of the Telegraph article asks.

Enter EDITD. That’s exactly what the startup is attempting to do: back up the intuition with data. Specifically, they’re backing it up with social media data, which has the potential to provide a much larger sample size than even WGSN’s 400-strong staff can provide.

EDITD shows how products move at an individual level through pricing and aggregated size availability data

Having gotten a walkthrough of the site, the data and the way it’s presented is frankly amazing. While it’s more about historical data, it offers it at such a granular, precise level that it fills a gap that’s just not possible with even the most expansive photo archive or trade show coverage.

“But how does trend forecasting actually work and how can it provide value to the companies subscribing?

Isham Sardouk, senior vice president of Trend Forecasting at Stylesight, has experienced life as both a client, when he was designing at Victoria Secrets, and now as a forecaster-in-chief.

“We work 18 months ahead across several markets such as men, women, children and interiors, and our job is to provide food for thought,” he says. “There is a 16 to 18 month lead time with retailers and so the majority of our forecasts are not for the fast track fashion decisions but for the longer term decisions, although we do provide short term forecasts too.” {the Telegraph}

It may not be scientifically proven yet, but EDITD offers the kind of easy to understand, visually engaging data-driven forecasting that has been either completely missing, or too technical to be useful to the people who need it. Ultimately the proof of any trend forecast is in the purchase (consumer purchase, that is).

If you’re a retailer trying to decide if you should take a bet on stripes, EDITD can tell you exactly how fast striped garments sold out, which sizes sold fastest and at what price. It’s based on publicly available information, so there is the limitation of not knowing how many pieces were available in the first place, but even with limitations that’s information above and beyond anything else we’ve seen. Curious to know how people really feel about a particular shade of green that was all over the runways? Get an early idea of positive or negative sentiment as measured through tweets and Facebook likes, and see how that changes over time. Fashion at every level moves much more quickly than it did in the past – there are no longer 2 collections (Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter) but 4 (including pre-fall and resort, where a growing portion of sales happen) when it comes to designer clothing, and fast fashion has become a completely new category.

Then consider that the two industry leaders can offer predictions of what will happen in a year an a half, but nothing around what’s happening right now, in real time, with real data and we’d say EDITD is the company to look to as the next big fashion trend behind the fashion trends.