Trend reports are normally based on what’s been shown on the runway. But the prevalence of a certain color or pattern doesn’t necessarily mean people are interested in it. Fashion will always be an industry for visionaries – creative people who push design ideas the mass market didn’t know they wanted until seeing them. That said, fashion shows and presentations are no longer industry only events. They’re part of the marketing mix to reach customers, and through social media the fan, editor, buyer and shopper can all contribute to the data that exposes where interest is highest.

That’s the idea behind our latest special feature on Fashion Week Trends. We crawled photos associated with nearly 200 shows, more than 5400 individual looks, and let the social media data tell the story. View the Top 25 shows from New York Fashion Week, as well as the Top 50 looks. Individual show rankings are available, with look metrics. The NYFW Runway Intel report combines all of the activity for a complete look at the colors, shapes and designers with the most interest.

So, to demonstrate just how big of a thing FNO has become, let’s take a look at Fashion Month’s unofficial kickoff by the numbers.

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And lo and behold, while pulling together information for this visual overview, we discovered something heartening: the vast majority of retailers, at least in New York City, are trying to draw shoppers in with food, music, product launches or gifts with purchase. Out of 1216 NYC events, only 90 are tagged as celebrity events, and “celebrity” is a very generous term in some cases.

The evening still seems to be more of a party than anything else, but at least the promotions for most merchants are turned towards making the products the stars of Fashion’s Night Out.

Want to know where the wealthy shop online in the UK? Visit Signature9 UK for a look at the UK shopping sites popular with high earners.

It’s impossible to break out apparel shoppers for department store sites (many of which also sell home and garden items), so it should be noted than not every visitor browsing macys.com is there for clothing, beauty or jewelry items. But even if half of the visitors are there for dresses instead of dishes, Macy’s is attracting one of the largest (and richest) online shopping audiences.

Our data is from Google’s Ad Planner, which only offers visitor and demographic information going back one year. We can’t say if the economy has played a role in shifting online shopping preferences, but presently, wealthy online shoppers aren’t visiting luxury destinations in the same volume as they visit e-commerce sites with mid-level pricing. A possible silver lining for sites specializing in luxury sales: while they may not get the same volume of traffic, it’s quite possible that high end e-commerce sites earn more per sale and visitor.

Of the top 20 apparel e-commerce sites attracting the largest number of wealthy online shoppers, 6 (30%) are sites specializing in discount sales. Gilt and Rue La La are neck and neck for the title of the invitation sale site with the wealthiest visitors. Allowing for a small sampling error, the two sites could even reach the same number of wealthy visitors. The advantage, however, goes to Gilt Groupe, who attracts a combined 1.2 million visitors across the main Gilt site, and recently launched sister (and brother) sites Gilt Fuse and Gilt Man. Combined, Gilt Groupe attracts more visitors earning $100,000 or more than any other online only e-commerce apparel site besides Zappos. Pretty impressive for a company that’s not even 3 years old.

When it comes to visitors earning $100k or more per year, invitation sale sites may not have as many visitors as department stores, but as a percentage of visitors, a sizable portion are in this desirable online shopper demographic.

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