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A new study has found that Instagram may be able to predict who America’s Next Top Model will be.
A team of researchers from Indiana University have taken into account the physical and professional information available about fashion models, as well as the data Instagram collected during the fall of 2014, and managed to come up with a formula that has successfully predicted the majority of the new, popular models who graced the stage on Fashion Week.
The researchers defined popularity as new models who participated in a higher number of runway walks during the presentation of the Fall / Winter 2015 collection.
For their study, the researchers looked at the statistics of 400 models registered in the Fashion Model Directory, a huge database of female models. They examined their hair color, eye color, height, waist, hip, dress size and shoe size.
They also investigated which agency each model worked for. The authors wrote in their study that “Models with a top agency have, everything else being equal, nearly ten time higher chances of walking a runway than their counterparts represented by non top agencies”.
Last but not least, the research team also browsed each model’s Instagram page. They documented the number of “likes”, posts, and comments that they had and assessed whether the comments were mostly positive or mostly negative.
Emilio Ferrara, computer scientist from the University of Southern California, gave a statement to CBS News saying that once the researchers added the social media information, they instantly knew that they would be able to predict “whether a new face, a new model that just started […] would become popular, would run some top runway in the immediate future” with an accuracy of 80 percent (80%).
Ferrara and his colleagues focused their attention on 15 new models and predicted that eight (8) of them would be some of the most popular new faces of the Fall / Winter 2015 season. Six (6) of their predictions turned out to be true. The right guesses were Phillipa Hemphrey, Melanie Culley, Sasha Antonowskaia, Renata Scheffer, Arina Levchenko and Sofia Tesmenitskaya.
As for the new models that the researchers predicted would be the least popular, they echoed pretty much the same pattern – six (6) out of the seven (7) predictions turned out to be right.
The findings stayed true even when the team looked at the Instagram pages of more established models. The more active they were on social media, and the more users talked about them, the more they were likely to be successful on the runway.
In fact, models increase their chances of success just by simply being present on Instagram. But if you’re a model and you happen to have a high number of comments and “likes”, as well as frequent postings, your chances of experiencing popularity on the runway increase even further.
The researchers also said that the tone of the comments did not matter, but that too high of a number of “likes” actually decreases a model’s chances of being successful by 10 percent (10%).
Image Source: fashionisers.com
