Friday, November 30, 2018

Cambridge Analytica used fashion tastes to profile Facebook users - Engadget

The Cambridge Analytica scandal blew the lid off Facebook's haphazard handling of user data earlier this year. More than eight months have passed since it came to light and we're still gleaning more info about the ways the now-defunct company -- with ties to Steve Bannon -- used the harvested data of some 87 million Facebook users for political purposes. One of its methods was "fashion profiling," according to Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie.

Speaking at a Business of Fashion event in the UK, Wylie said his former company used the fashion brands people liked on Facebook as a key metric in its bid to elect Donald Trump. He name-dropped L.L. Bean and Wrangler -- two American heritage brands that deal in outerwear and workwear respectively -- as signifying "conservative values." On the flip side, a fondness for European fashion house, Kenzo, reflected the opposite.

"One of the things Cambridge Analytica noticed when pulling the Facebook data was fashion brands were really useful in producing algorithms about how people think and feel," Wylie said. "Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his insurgency and build the alt-right."

Though it sheds light on the type of data points Cambridge Analytica used, the link between fashion brands and political leanings won't come as a surprise to many. Labels supposedly aligned to either side of the political divide have been praised and scorned in equal measure of late. Remember when New Balance owners burned their sneakers after the brand's CEO appeared to praise Trump's trade plans in 2016? More recently, Nike caused a stir among some sections of its fanbase by naming Colin Kapernick the new face of its "Just Do It" campaign.

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https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/30/cambridge-analytica-fashion-facebook/

Black Fashion Designers Weave Identity and Diversity into Their Pieces - VICE

Designer Virgil Abloh. Photo credit: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images

A gospel choir sang as the first model to walk the runway for Pyer Moss’ Spring/Summer 2019 collection emerged in an ethereal white silk gown styled with teal eyeliner and an afro. She walked hand-in-hand with a young black boy wearing a FUBU by Pyer Moss sweater as the rain fell. The collection, designed by the 2018 winner of the prestigious CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Kerby Jean-Raymond, debuted at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

By the end of his latest preview, 48 black models had displayed Jean-Raymond’s work, including a dress featuring a black father soothing his baby, a green silk set with multi-hued-black faces, and a white cummerbund with “See us now?” embroidered across it. Jean-Raymond is no stranger to weaving social commentary about the black American experience into his work—the designer screened a short documentary he’d produced about police brutality at his spring/summer 2016 show. To too many, black bodies are a threat, and black culture is expendable.

In Jean-Raymond’s case, his show was rightfully celebrated as a step towards diversity of perspectives in fashion, but inclusion in the fashion industry is hardly discernible. The runways of the latest New York Fashion Week featured 44.8 percent models of color, more than any other year according to The Fashion Spot. But while the runways have diversified exponentially, the number of black designers has not. “People still like to sit across the desk from people who look like them,” said Mark-Evan Blackman, professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Models walks the runway at Pyer Moss' Summer/Spring runway show. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.

A small number of the more than 500 members of the Council of Fashion Designers of America are black. The Cut reported that, “Less than 10 percent of the 146 fashion designers who showed at the major fall 2018 shows for New York Fashion Week were black.” The fashion industry has been slow-moving to embrace designers of color, but a handful of young black designers are using their platforms to incorporate their identities and experiences into their offerings.

When designer Recho Omondi held her first show in Chelsea, a cast of all-black models carried her designs down the runway. “For me, it felt like the natural thing to do,” said Omondi, whose identity informs her eponymous womenswear brand. “When I did that show four years ago, no one had done that.”

Born to Kenyan parents in Oklahoma, Omondi, who received her B.F.A from the Savannah College of Art and Design, isn’t shy to the fact that she’s among a handful of black female designers in the industry. The Brooklyn-based designer releases one thoughtful collection a year. So far, each has been shot by a black photographer and presented on black models. The latest collection, photographed by Micaiah Carter in an abandoned locker room overrun by shrubbery, features hyperbolic proportions, romantic silhouettes, tulle, and mostly muted colors.

“When I refer to my identity or my culture, it's not so unique what I'm doing, it’s just a different perspective,” she said. Omondi, who counts Solange Knowles and Issa Rae as admirers, has demonstrated that there’s always been a place for black women in an industry that has historically been interested in exploring their identity, but not in its entirety.

Today almost everything on the designer’s site, from her best-selling sweater with “N*****” hand-embroidered in the corner, to her cashmere trousers, is sold out. “In the past, fashion narratives have been very bourgeois because it was very aspirational and exclusive,” said Omondi. “Now we’ve entered this time where more people can participate.”

Even so, no black designer has comparable name recognition, financial investment, or fervor to the Donna Karens, Diane Von Furstenbergs, or Alexander McQueens. Carly Cushnie and Tracy Reese, both black designers, have created modern feminine clothes for more than a decade. Olivier Rousteing is the creative director of Balmain. It’s Virgil Abloh of Off-White, who recently debuted his first collection as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, who’s come closest.

“We historically haven’t had access to that access and resources,” said Julee Wilson, fashion and beauty director at Essence. “It’s important for me to do my part as far as getting the word out there about designers of color that are awesome, but I can’t get them into a factory necessarily, or floor space at Bergdorf's.”

Issa Rae wearing Recho Omondi's N**** sweater on 'Insecure.' Photo courtesy of HBO.

Part of the problem is that the fashion industry is veiled in mystery. For new designers, there’s no clear path to starting and maintaining a brand. Success in fashion is often synonymous with access and money, or access to money, so designing is closed off to those that don’t have the capital.

In the eighties, Mississippi-born designer Patrick Kelly, moved to New York City to pursue a career in fashion. Snubbed by the city’s fashion hierarchy, the designer’s friend Renaldo Barnette said Kelly relocated to Paris, where he debuted his electric ready-to-wear women’s collection in 1985. Like Kelly’s dresses and jackets, his models were bold and colorful. He was the first American designer to be inducted to the Chambre Syndicale, a prestigious design community in France. Before Kelly died in 1990, his designs were well-known in the U.S and France and had been featured in French Elle. According to Barnette, he’d received financial backing from Warnaco, an American clothing conglomerate.

“I think people who had access to fashion most of their lives were people who were affluent most of their lives,” said Aurora James, founder of the artisanal accessories brand, Brother Vellies. It’s a systematic problem in America that most of those people happen to be white, added James, who is optimistic that the industry is becoming more open-minded to people of color. The Toronto-native, whose father is Ghanaian, is interested in preserving the artistry behind each Brother Vellies piece and does so by paying a living wage to the communities she employs in South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Mali, Haiti, Italy, and Bali.

Kim Jenkins teaches about the intersection of race and fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York and finds that for designers of color, “Their education and the breadth of their knowledge is underestimated. You have to work three or four times as hard as your white counterparts.”

Aurora James (R) with Elaine Welteroth, editor in chief of Teen Vogue. Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images.

The best-known opportunity for emerging designers to secure funding is through the Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund. Annually, the Fund provides $400,000 to one first place winner and $150,000 each to the two runners-up. Past winners have included fashion powerhouses Proenza Schouler, Alexander Wang, and Altuzarra. Brother Vellies won the prize in 2015 and Telfar Clemens of Telfar won first place last year.

Telfar, a socially-conscious designer, collaborated with White Castle on a capsule collection and 100 percent of the proceeds were donated to the Robert F. Kennedy Fund for Freedom and Human Rights to help minors pay bail on Rikers Island. Indifferent to the scarcity and exclusivity that drives much of the hype in fashion, Telfar’s site reads, “It's not for you — it's for everyone.” Telfar is Liberian-American and his designs are gender-fluid. His latest collection was reminiscent of the 1970s, featuring bell bottoms, mixed denim, and exaggerated cut-outs.

While the fashion industry prides itself on its open-mindedness, it’s long been helmed by white designers and editors, and finds itself wrestling with how to respond to a political climate that castigates women, minorities, and immigrants. As social media has partially democratized access, these gatekeepers must make decisions in front of an audience. Designers including Clemens, Omondi, James, and Jean-Raymond have established that representation in fashion isn’t a trend, but rather a best practice.

“For the first time, Americans are starting to understand that American does not just mean cherry pie and cowboy boots,” said Omondi. “People want to be able to tell their own stories rather than having their stories told for them.”

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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pa5zmg/black-fashion-designers-weave-identity-and-diversity-into-their-pieces

Cambridge Analytica used fashion tastes to profile Facebook users - Engadget

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https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/30/cambridge-analytica-fashion-facebook/

An African fashion bordering between desire and rebellion - FRANCE 24

For its 20th edition, the International Festival of African Fashion has swapped its native Niger for Dakhla, Western Sahara. For Alphadi, the festival’s founder and president – himself a designer – fashion is all about collaboration. It’s a tool for forging communities and encouraging integration. This year, as ever, it’s important for the continent to have a chance to put its best foot forward… the world, after all, is watching.

By Media TV

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https://www.france24.com/en/20181130-fashion-fima2018-garydourdon-salimaabdelwahab-alphadi-daniellaovono-hamzaguelmouss

Fashion's role in Cambridge Analytica's 'cyber warfare,' according to Christopher Wylie - CNN

Written by Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNNOxfordshire, England

Fashion is a powerful tool. Covering our bodies in clothes or adornments is an almost universal behavior, and how you dress is one of the most obvious indicators of who you are.

Show me a list of people, and the fashion brands they buy from or engage with, and I could easily produce a series of assumptions about each one. I might make an educated guess about their spending power, or how fashion-conscious they are (or aren't). I might even be able to give you a sense of their character -- at least, I'd feel fairly confident distinguishing the peacocks from the shrinking violets.

Speaking at The Business of Fashion's Voices conference in the UK on Thursday, data analyst and Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie took this relatively simple idea to its worrying but logical extension: Like any tool, he said, fashion can become a weapon in the wrong hands.

"Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his insurgency and build the alt-right," he told the conference. "We used weaponized algorithms. We used weaponized cultural narratives to undermine people and undermine the perception of reality. And fashion played a big part in that."

He would certainly know. As research director at Cambridge Analytica, Wylie used data harvested from 87 million Facebook users to produce algorithms that he says influenced the 2016 US presidential election. And having previously worked toward a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he knew that someone's choice of clothing is one of the best ways to unpick their identity.

On stage, Wylie explained how people's preferences for fashion brands on social media were used to target specific groups with right-wing political messages. Although he has previously divulged how people's online activity was used to predict political leanings, it was the first time that he publicly detailed fashion's role -- and importance -- in Cambridge Analytica's models.

During his presentation, Wylie showed various charts and graphics demonstrating how the now-defunct firm mapped clothing brands against personality traits.

"There are strong relationships between the brands, style and aesthetics that people engage with, and how they see themselves and their identity," Wylie said during the talk.

Christopher Wylie speaks on stage during The Business of Fashion's Voices conference in Oxfordshire, England. The chart compares supposed personality traits of individuals who like Wrangler versus Abercrombie & Fitch. Credit: John Phillips/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion

Brands like Wrangler, the jeans company, and the American student favorite Abercrombie & Fitch were compared and contrasted. Wrangler is "more cowboy, older," and more "modest" than Abercrombie, Wylie said. People who like yoga-wear brand Lululemon "are more extroverted," while L.L. Bean fans are conscientious but "low in openness." Other brands featured included Nike, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Armani, H&M, Elle and Vogue.

The simple, palatable takeaway is that modest, traditional, conventional brands tend to be favored by those with more conservative ideals, while provocative, directional brands, like Kenzo, were more likely to be worn by the liberal-minded.

A model walks in Kenzo, during the men's Spring/Summer 2019 collection fashion show on June 24, 2018 in Paris. Credit: FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Targeting vulnerability

The idea that advertisers might target us based on the brands we like, follow, talk about or engage with is hardly new. Nor is the story that Cambridge Analytica used "hyper-profiling" to target different groups for political gain.

More interesting, however, is Wylie's claim that fashion preferences are statistically among the strongest indicators of our personalities -- and that they were a particular focus at Cambridge Analytica.

What makes this especially irksome is the emphasis on specific personality traits. Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (the "big five" identified in a psychological model known as OCEAN) were the key traits mentioned.

But others listed in the materials shared by Wylie included depression, anger and vulnerability. In other words, people were being segmented on the basis of their mental stability. Then, if they were considered vulnerable to persuasion, they were targeted with political messaging. This is where the story starts to take on dystopian overtones.

According to Wylie, and as reported by The Business of Fashion, "consulting psychologists encouraged researchers at the firm to ask more questions on aesthetic and stylistic preferences for clothing as they were found to be strong signifiers of traits that were used as a primary means to identify people who were susceptible to joining the alt-right."

A placard of Abercrombie & Fitch hangs at the opening of a flagship store on October 25, 2012 in Munich, Germany. Credit: Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images Europe/Getty Images

Having helped create what he called -- in typically bellicose terms -- an "informational weapon of mass destruction," Wylie then ended his talk by turning responsibility over to the fashion industry. Those in the room had "created the battlefields" of a culture war, he said before directly challenging them to fix the problem.

"We need you guys to do a better job at cultivating our cultural narratives, for our own national security and for the preservation of our democracy," he said.

"The shame, the colonialism, the racial biases, the toxic masculinity, the fat-shaming that industry puts out -- and has been putting out for decades -- is exactly what Cambridge Analytica sought to exploit when they were seeking to undermine people and manipulate them."

The message, in simple terms: Stop making people feel bad, Fashion. It makes them easy targets for untoward digital dealings.

A call to arms

It was difficult to get a sense of how the CEOs and other fashion industry figures in the room felt about Wylie's rallying cry. There was loud clapping, and most people stood to cheer eventually, but the room didn't exactly shake. Just hours later, designer Alber Elbaz attracted a more kinetic reaction by ending his own talk by blasting out Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and dragging people up on stage for a dance.

Did Wylie tell the industry something it already knew? Or is this another case of negative news overload -- just another horrible story about the US presidential election and data?

There are, or course, fashion brands that understand how to balance looking good and doing good. Some of them were represented at the conference.

Stella McCartney, for instance, has been working towards sustainability in fashion for nearly 20 years, and she used the event to announce two new green initiatives: A United Nations charter for sustainable fashion, launching officially on December 10 at the UN's annual climate change conference, and Stella McCartney Cares Green, a new arm of her charity platform.

Christopher Wylie speaks on stage during Voices. Credit: John Phillips/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion

But whether the fashion industry has the power, or the collective desire, to defend us from the cultural cyber warfare foretold by Wylie, remains to be seen. The fashion world is already tackling a number of troubling issues right now: diversity and inclusion, the treatment of models, human rights in garment factories, sustainability, the fur question. Solving some of these would, indirectly, constitute a start, as it would help craft more positive narratives for brands in need, but the road looks long.

As for Wylie, H&M announced that it has hired him as its director of research. The high street retailer is attempting to use AI and data to optimize its supply chains, with one of the outcomes -- if all goes well -- being the reduction of textile waste produced by over-ordering. Perhaps, having held a mirror up to the fashion industry, Wylie now has the chance to make amends and take up his own call to arms.

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https://www.cnn.com/style/article/christopher-wylie-fashion-cambridge-analytica/

Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer: ‘Fashion is replacing music as cultural lubricant’ - Glossy

Since joining Index Ventures as general partner in 2002, VC Danny Rimer has been building out an investment portfolio of some of the biggest names in retail and e-commerce: He led Farfetch’s second round, had a later stage investment in Glossier, and established stakes in Asos, Etsy and Net-a-Porter. He’s also tapped into the rise of streetwear, investing in GOAT, Grailed and End Clothing since 2014.

“Fashion is replacing music as that cultural lubricant that breaks down barriers,” Rimer said. “Streetwear is a big part of that.”

Before Index, he was an equity analyst at boutique investment bank Hambrecht & Quist, where he worked on the Amazon IPO.

For the latest edition in Glossy’s Ask a VC series, Rimer discussed how Amazon is currently impacting retail, how brick-and-mortar stores need to evolve and what he learned from investing in Nasty Gal.

Why invest in competitors, as you did with Net-a-Porter and Farfetch?
We come up with an investment theme, and we try and invest across it. We’re based out of London, so in the beginning, we were looking for investment themes that were more unique to Europe than our peers in the U.S., and fashion was one of them; many of the fashion houses and ateliers are based in Europe. So we invested in Asos for fast fashion, which was, and still is, a great business online. And we invested in Net-a-Porter. We realized Net-a-Porter was a great business, but that fundamentally, marketplaces were probably going to be a better business model for scale. And so we decided to double down on Farfetch instead. It was a little tap dance to do between Net-a-Porter and Farfetch, but now it’s all good, because [Net-a-Porter founder] Natalie [Massenet] is co-chair of Farfetch; it’s like the team is back together.

What drove your investment in advanced contemporary line Anine Bing in September?
She is so authentic with what she’s doing. She’s an influencer, she was early on in the days of Instagram, and she had a clear sense of what she wanted to do. The brand also manufactures product, which was really important. And they have a number of stores. It’s a really interesting question of: Can you, from the ground up, starting with Instagram, create a really important fashion label or brand? I don’t know; the jury’s out. It’s still a small brand, but so far, so good.

Is it important that the brands you invest in have physical stores?
The physical component is absolutely critical, but it has to be rethought, and it has to be experiential, and it has to provide something differentiated from the online experience, and very few companies are doing that well. Anine [Bing] is, and it’s related to the freshness of the offering: the fact that you go into the store and you see things that were not online, and you go online, and you see things that were not in the store. It’s a new way of thinking about the supply chain, which I think they’re very thoughtful about. In the case of Glossier, it’s much more about the experience of the store. I would be very surprised if Emily [Weiss] ever had 10 stores, but every store is an experience, and every store is a way of the brand being manifested through the experience, and she does that through pop-ups, as well.

Have you become more interested in beauty and wellness, now that the categories are booming?
Beauty is a really important category. But there are really significant challenges around a number of these huge conglomerates — Estée Lauder, L’Oréal — that have a lot of wherewithal and basically dominate many parts of the chain of the customer life cycle, from the manufacturing to the branding to the selling. There’s a lot of history there, and so it doesn’t really lend itself to being able to upset the category in the same way that a fashion brand can. There are more significant challenges to really building a beauty company of significance.

What have been some key learnings in your years of investing in fashion brands?
I learn more from my mistakes than successes. Understanding the end goals of the entrepreneur is a really important one. Jose [Neves] at Farfetch and Emily at Glossier and Natalie at Net-a-Porter — they were all very interested in building the businesses they were in and they had started. I invested in Nasty Gal with Sophia Amoruso, and that was a different story. Sophia is really building now much more of the business that she was really excited about, which is much more a movement for women who want to be professionals, which is not really a fashion brand. So that was a big lesson. I also learned the importance of being more in control of your future by manufacturing product and understanding supply chain, rather than buying end product or a finished good and remarketing it — that’s a much more difficult way of building differentiation.

Has Amazon’s impact on retail affected your investment strategy?
Amazon does a really good job on mainstream products that are all about convenience, and when you really know what you want — toiletries, things for your kitchen. But when it comes to something that’s going to define who you are, or it starts touching on your identity and the way you’re represented, it’s not really a core competency of theirs. That’s really where we spend our time, thinking about: OK, if Amazon really wins in the mainstream, what are the other areas that are more relevant to the way a person defines themselves? Someone is not going to buy sneakers that are going to give them a sense of self from Amazon or Zappos. They’re not going to buy a blouse or a skirt from Amazon. It’s going to be a more thoughtful purchase, so they’re going to end up on Farfetch, hopefully. Or maybe if they wanted a crafted good, like a beautiful tea set, they’ll go on Etsy, because it will be made by craftspeople, rather than something that’s generic that they could buy at Target or at all these other retailers that are going out of business because of Amazon.

Is there a common link among the successful brands you’ve invested in?
A lot of the businesses have won because they have supply that no one else has. If you think of Farfetch and its success, it’s fundamentally not because of the brand they’ve built; the brand has really been an offshoot of the superior supply they’ve provided with the great customer experience. Now they’re working on brand, but it’s not part of Jose’s DNA to think of brand first — it’s thinking of supply for the customer, and how to help the industry, and how to provide a platform that will enable folks who don’t want to engage in the Amazon monolith to survive or to thrive. Now, there’s a lot they’re having to rethink.

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https://www.glossy.co/ecommerce/ndex-ventures-danny-rimer-fashion-is-replacing-music-as-cultural-lubricant

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Fast Fashion Ethics: Should Clothing E-Tailers Be More Transparent? - Forbes

On November 27^th, execs at fashion e-tailers Boohoo Group, Asos and Misguided attended the second evidence hearing on the sustainability of the fashion industry at the houses of parliament in London. The Committee pushed the three execs – ASOS CEO Nick Beighton, Boohoo.com CEO Carol Kane, who represented both Boohoo and PrettyLittleThing, and Missguided head of product quality and supply Paul Smith – on their manufacturing practices in the English city of Leicester. This followed an earlier hearing on October 30, when the committee heard evidence about below-legal wages and unethical conditions for clothing manufacturing workers.

The current inquiry follows a period of increased scrutiny for the online clothing retailers, as the UK political sphere, under pressure from the public, turns its attention on clothing manufacturing practices. The questionable ethics of sourcing from the top four clothing manufacturing destinations – China, where 21%of garment importers say they source their stock, Bangladesh and India (tied for second place with 14%) and Vietnam (12%) - have been in the public spotlight for several years. Many high-street retailers, notably Primark, H&M, Inditex-owned Zara, source at least a percentage of their garments in these countries. While many have taken widely publicized steps in recent years to ensure the safe working conditions and living wages of their workers, as of the end of 2018, a lot remains to be done. According to the Fashion Transparency Index report, published annually by the non-profit Fashion Revolution, global fashion brands have increased the overall social and environmental transparency of their sourcing practices by just 5% since last year.

Despite this, international sourcing practices remain difficult to police at the government level, which may be one of the reasons why the UK government has taken issue with these four e-tailers in particular – all of which have manufacturing facilities in the UK.

In this week’s hearing, Smith testified that Missguided had reduced its presence in Leicester, after recognizing its inability to satisfactorily audit the factories it was using. Having started this year working with 35 manufacturers at 80 different sites, the company now sources from 12 suppliers at 20 factories.

Beighton stated his satisfaction with the standards in the factories Asos uses.

Kane defended allegations from the previous hearing that Boohoo’s £5 dresses were responsible for underpaid workers and promoting unsustainable and non-environmental consumer buying patterns.

“We have 80 dresses from over 60,000 styles that are £5. They are loss leaders and we don’t make any money on them, but it’s a marketing technique to drive people to our website,” he said, according to Drapers.

Ethical manufacturing as a profit driver?

Ethical manufacturing has not previously been on clothing manufacturers’ radar because it does not, typically, offer a monetary incentive. Simply put, ensuring socially and environmentally ethical manufacturing is expensive and consumers looking for relatively cheap clothing around payday will hit the checkout button regardless of their concerns about worker pay.

However, the dual push of an increasingly ethically conscious consumer and the threat of legislative penalties is likely to tip the needle toward more transparency around manufacturing practices. As with the three different approaches seen at Boohoo, Missguided and ASOS, online retailers will tackle this issue differently.

Some are likely to diversify their product mix, adding higher-price, “ethically manufactured” clothing, effectively turning sourcing transparency into a feature of the clothing. A similar approach has already been employed by high-street giant H&M with its “Conscious” line. Another approach will be to limit manufacturing to a number of trusted factories and use the higher volume of orders to negotiate manufacturing discounts.

Lastly, technological advances in manufacturing automation are likely to relieve wage concerns in the future.

One thing is certain, however. With the increasing demand for convenience, particularly in e-commerce, retailers will not be able to lengthen production cycles without taking a hit to profits. More and more e-tailers, entering the fast fashion cycle, will be pushed to square consumer demands for new products with ones for manufacturing transparency.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriapavlova/2018/11/29/fast-fashion-ethics-should-clothing-e-tailers-be-more-transparent/

Celebrities made suits one of the biggest fashion trends of 2018 - INSIDER

According to global fashion search platform Lyst, suits were one of the five biggest trends influenced by celebrities in 2018.
From Blake Lively to Bella Hadid, some of Hollywood's biggest stars wore pantsuits this year.
While some stars opted for crisp, tailored looks, others donned oversized, business-casual designs.

Athleisure dominated celebrity fashion in 2018, reviving '90s trends like bike shorts and dad sneakers. But over the past 12 months, Hollywood was also swept by a more tailored look: suits.

One of the biggest fans of the trend, Blake Lively famously wore five different pantsuits in one day in September. Lady Gaga's oversized suit at Elle's annual Women in Hollywood celebration went viral overnight. And Meghan Markle has pushed the envelope of royal fashion in several designer suits since she became a duchess in May.

According to global fashion search platform Lyst, which recently released its annual Year in Fashion report, suits were also one of the five biggest trends influenced by celebrities in 2018, with searches for women's suits up 87% year on year.

Below, take a look at some of the most memorable ways celebrities wore the trend this year.

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https://www.thisisinsider.com/celebrities-suits-fashion-trends-2018-11

Cambridge Analytica used data on fashion preferences to target Facebook users - Vox

On Thursday, at a fashion conference in the UK, Christopher Wylie — the former Cambridge Analytica employee who revealed earlier this year that the political consulting company had harvested information from 87 million Facebook profiles to influence people on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — explained a perhaps surprising area of focus for the company’s data mining effort: fashion choices.

When creating the different types of psychographic profiles on social media to determine where to spread pro-Trump messaging, Wylie told audiences at the Business of Fashion Voices conference that the consulting firm looked for fashion brands whose history and style seemed to appeal to people who would be susceptive to populist and nationalist messaging, with the belief that style choices had direct correlations to political opinions.

”One of the things Cambridge Analytica noticed when pulling the Facebook data was fashion brands were really useful in producing algorithms about how people think and feel,” Wylie said. “Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his insurgency and build the alt-right.”

In March, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, the firm started by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and funded by conservative donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, harvested massive amounts of data from tens of millions of Facebook users leading up to the 2016 presidential election. That information was then used to target voters with pro-Trump messaging and fake news stories, a tactic that’s widely been cited as helping Trump win. Facebook claimed that Cambridge Analytica misused its information, but the fact that the firm accessed and distributed Facebook data in such a manipulative and predatory way has contributed to the deep erosion of public trust in Facebook. (Cambridge Analytica announced in March that it was shutting down.)

Cambridge Analytica collected the data via a personality quiz called “thisisyourdigitallife,” created by Russian researcher Aleksandr Kogan. The quiz exploited a loophole in Facebook’s API that allowed Kogan to harvest the data of the user, as well as that of their Facebook friends. The data included information like people’s birthdays, relationships, religions, locations, work history, subscriptions, and check-ins. The firm also had access to user “likes,” and it analyzed which fashion brands users were interested in.

Cambridge Analytica decided to study five personality attributes: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, according to Wylie. It then studied how those attributes correlated with preferences for different fashion brands. Cambridge Analytica determined, for example, that a Facebook user who liked typical American heritage brands like Wrangler or LL Bean also often scored low on the “open” metric, and would therefore respond to Trump’s populist anti-immigration and “America First” campaigns.

On the flip side, it determined that a European brand like Kenzo would not appeal to a Trump supporter, ideologically.

As Wylie points out, user data from Facebook created an entirely new field of targeted messaging — one that was used with dangerous intentions. Cambridge Analytica learned from Facebook data, for example, that not all American brands equal conservative views. Users who liked Abercrombie & Fitch or Macy’s, for example, were actually determined to be liberal, as were readers of Vogue. Wylie describes the ability to obtain such nitty-gritty results from fashion preferences and use them to drive people’s actions and political views as the tech industry’s ability to “colonize” people.

“We are creating informational ghettos,” he said. “We are cognitively segregating our society.”

As BoF points out, Cambridge Analytica wasn’t investigating fashion brands because of a user’s style. Consumer choice is also linked to political views.

Since Trump began running for office, everything from Skittles to national parks has become politicized, and fashion has been thrown into the mix too. Nordstrom faced mass boycotts for stocking Ivanka Trump’s fashion brand, and then weathered additional boycotts when it decided to drop the troubled label in February 2017 (the first daughter’s label shut down for good earlier this year). When Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank praised Trump for being “pro-business,” he faced serious backlash from shoppers as well as UA ambassadors like Steph Curry and Misty Copeland.

Sometimes brands explicitly send political messages. Nike’s ad campaign with Colin Kaepernick, for example, meant the sporting goods giant was taking a stand in the debate over NFL players’ right to kneel during the national anthem. (While it faced some backlash, the campaign was overall a huge win for Nike.) Patagonia, too, is one of fashion’s most activism-friendly labels and has made fighting Trump a huge part of its branding.

But fashion brands’ implicit messaging is also important. Wrangler is an American manufacturer of denim that also makes Western apparel. While its parent company VF Corp also owns North Face, which was one of the outdoor brands to speak out against Trump after the president’s declaration to decrease the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments, Cambridge Analytica found that Wrangler wearers skewed conservative and liked “orderliness,” labeling them as susceptible to pro-Trump propaganda.

Alt-right demonstrators encircle counter-protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville on August 11, 2017.

Clothing also helps wearers determine self-expression, and specific brands and images become important to the alt-right. Last summer, for example, the mob of demonstrators at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville chose the prep look of white polo shirts and khaki pants — a look that was chosen deliberately to represent polished normalcy, even though it co-opted a look created by Jews. Fred Perry polos and Ben Sherman “Bennies” button-downs have also both been historical fashion choices of white supremacists because of their associations with the British upper class.

Cambridge Analytica’s targeting of people based on fashion choices is yet another example of how tech companies can use the enormous amounts of data they collect about us to their own ends — and perhaps to our disadvantage. It also presents another potential problem, Wylie suggested, in that fashion companies could use their branding identities to steer opinions in a certain political direction.

We’ve seen this in how Facebook ad-targeting delivers the precise type of products you’d buy, or have already bought. This type of data usage is expected in advertising; it’s what credit card data mining companies have been doing for decades. But when it comes to privacy, democracy, and national sovereignty, it’s an example of how something as seemingly anodyne as fashion data can be used in ugly ways.

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Stella McCartney Announces UN Charter for Sustainable Fashion - The Business of Fashion

OXFORDSHIRE, United Kingdom — Stella McCartney has spent her professional career spearheading environmental issues and making sustainability practices a business priority. Now, with a new fashion industry charter for climate action, she is hoping other fashion companies, big and small, will follow in her footsteps.

The charter, announced on stage at VOICES, BoF’s annual gathering for big thinkers in partnership with QIC Global Real Estate, has been developed by the United Nations in collaboration with McCartney. The full charter will be launched at COP 24 sustainability convention on December 10, detailing 16 commitments to help fashion companies curb the immense damage the industry is having on the planet.

It’s critical that fashion businesses sign on, said McCartney.

“Everything is at stake,” she said. “It’s really about bringing everyone together as an industry, and instead of having a few people talk about it, it's having everyone talk about it and the leaders ... actually taking responsibility, putting our money where our mouth is and making an amazing change together.”

The designer also announced her new charitable initiative, Stella McCartney Cares Green, a sister arm to her Stella McCartney Cares Pink platform launched in October, which focuses on breast cancer awareness.

With a focus on sustainability, Stella McCartney Cares Green will empower students, professionals and businesses to embrace sustainability and ethical practices. It will also work towards influencing policymakers to take action too.

“One of the things I’m most excited about is creating some sort of fund for lawyers and NGOs, creating some sort of policy change,” said the designer. Technological innovation, incentives for businesses and scholarships for students will also be focuses for the charity.

A lifelong vegetarian, McCartney built the namesake label she founded in 2001 around principles of sustainable and ethical consumption practices. Unlike many luxury competitors, the designer has never created or sold any products containing fur, leather or exotic skins. Her best-selling bag, the Falabella, is made from polyester and recycled nylon. She also won’t wear animal products — even the Adidas Stan Smiths she wore on stage are custom made from vegan leather.

It’s really about ... actually taking responsibility, putting our money where our mouth is and making an amazing change together.

Originally the business was a joint venture between herself and the Gucci Group, then a subsidiary of what is now Kering. In March, McCartney bought the conglomerate’s 50 percent share, ending the 17-year partnership and bringing the brand fully under her control.

McCartney said she will continue to work on the environmental profit and loss programme, which attributes a monetary value to the brand's environmental impact, a project initiated under Kering. Being open and honest is also important for the company.

“[Transparency] has to become more important to people in every industry," she said. "And also manning up about the things we need help on, because we’re not perfect.”

Industry collaboration through open sourcing will play an important role in spurring on progress within the industry, said McCartney. She gave the example of the viscose fabric her company uses in the clothes she designs.

“Viscose comes from trees. Most people don’t know that. Over 150 million trees are cut down for viscose alone in the fashion industry and these are from our rainforest — this is huge disaster for the planet,” she said. “It’s taken over two years to get a [fabric] quality that we’re happy with, but we’re the only people in the industry probably using that. … I want to share that.”

The charter will help to facilitate more sharing of resources within the industry, said McCartney, who urged VOICES attendees to sign up to the agreement, not least because the very future of the planet depends on it.

“My personal idea of luxury is having a voice, having freedom, clean air to breathe, animals by our side that are happy and healthy having pure water to drink, having mother nature and planet Earth as the ultimate. I don’t know what else luxury is,” the designer reflected, pausing before adding jokingly, “other than a Falabella bag and Vegan Stan Smiths.”

To learn more about VOICES, BoF's annual gathering for big thinkers, visit our VOICES website, where you can find all the details on our invitation-only global gathering, in partnership with QIC Global Real Estate.

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Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters - The New York Times

Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters

Christopher Wylie, who helped found the voter-profiling firm, said that clothing preferences had been key to helping “Steve Bannon build his insurgency.”

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Christopher Wylie at the Business of Fashion conference.CreditCreditSamir Hussein/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion

By Vanessa Friedman and Jonah Engel Bromwich

Nov. 29, 2018

You’ve heard of profiling criminals, but welcome to fashion profiling — the practice of classifying and targeting individuals based on their clothing brand preferences. Fashion profiling played a bigger role in the 2016 American presidential election than anyone realized, according to new information from Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower.

Today at a conference in Britain organized by the fashion industry website The Business of Fashion, Mr. Wylie explained that clothing preferences were a key metric for Cambridge Analytica, whose business was constructing and selling voter profiles drawn from Facebook data.

“Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his insurgency and build the alt-right,” he said.

Preferences in clothing and music are the leading indicators of political leaning, he said. The narratives of the great American brands, which play on the myths of the West and the (mostly male) frontier are also the narratives of the Republican right. Those who choose to spend on the former are susceptible to the latter. He mentioned Wrangler and L.L. Bean in particular as brands that Cambridge Analytica aligned with conservative traits. (Kenzo, by contrast, which is designed by Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, the avant-garde duo behind the retail store Opening Ceremony, appealed to liberals, he suggested).

“Fashion brands are really useful in producing algorithms to find out how people think and how they feel,” Mr. Wylie said.

Neither Wrangler nor L.L. Bean responded to requests for comment.

David Stillwell, the deputy director of The Psychometrics Center at Cambridge University where much of Cambridge Analytica’s methodology was developed, compared this form of fashion analysis to a study showing that car ownership can correlate with political voting preferences in certain regions. (Places where hybrids line the streets reliably vote Democrat; the opposite is true where pickup trucks are concerned.)

“Essentially the reasoning is the same,” he said. “Different people choose different clothes and it correlates with their politics.”

Mr. Wylie’s revelations suggest a more informed and aggressive use of the fashion data that was regularly mined by political candidates themselves during the 2016 primary. Purchases made through each candidate’s online store were used to identify potential issues that could galvanize a voter. For example, if an individual bought an infant onesie from Hillary Clinton’s campaign website, it was a clue that said person might be influenced by emails about maternal health. If someone bought a beer mug from Rand Paul, he or she might respond to emails about saving manufacturing in America.

“It’s all about learning who your supporter base is,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the NPD Group and the author of “Why Customers Do What They Do,” in an interview during the 2016 campaign. “How do they live? What are their trigger points? What words resonate with them? It’s worth its weight in gold, in the political arena just like the consumer arena. We call it demographic profiling, because voter profiling sounds like a dirty word, but that’s what it is.”

Fashion profiling is another facet of this approach, using data analysis to identify the way brands are perceived — and it should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Assessing value systems, and goals and priorities, via the clothes people wear has been a part of professional life for years. The “dress for the job you want” adage is an expression of fashion profiling. Calling someone a “Gucci person” or a “Celine person” is fashion profiling; opting for Levi’s over Rag & Bone makes a statement about associations and history and opens one up to fashion profiling — albeit in a manner that generally leaves much unsaid. Cambridge Analytica preyed on that human reality via algorithm, using data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.

The data breach, which was first revealed in March, plunged Facebook into hot water with American and British lawmakers as it sought to explain how so much of its user data could have been used without those users’ knowledge or consent.

The event was just another example of how personal data, given incrementally to products and platforms over years, can be used to manipulate individuals in unanticipated and potentially damaging ways. Mr. Wylie used his talk at the Business of Fashion conference to protest Facebook’s enormous power, and said that the company was damaging society by separating people based on their cultural preferences. He exhorted those present to be conscious of the narratives embedded in their branding.

Most Instagram shoppers and selfie-takers are more concerned with credit card theft than being victims of targeted yet subtle political messaging. Still, most users now expect the trail of cultural crumbs they leave online to be used by brands (you’ve bought this, so you may like this!). The fact that consumer preferences are used by influence Svengalis to sway votes means something else entirely.

The wild tale of Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far

Revelations that digital consultants to the Trump campaign misused the data of millions of Facebook users set off a furor on both sides of the Atlantic. This is how The Times covered it.

April 4, 2018