It’s no surprise that New York, NY, is one of the most fashionable cities in the world, but what other U.S. cities measure up? According to the Trulia Fashion Index, Los Angeles, CA, actually beats the Big Apple, with Anaheim, CA, and Riverside, CA, respectively, trailing close behind.
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What factors are shifting fashion toward Southern California? According to Trulia’s Research and Economics team, the sheer amount of money in that region allows for a range of styles among residents’ closets. Data show a high concentration of fashion-specific businesses and personal shoppers and a vast number of occupied households with walk-in closets or dressing rooms. Additionally, live-streaming collections has become a hit since the first time in 2009, making it likely that Southern California may host its own Fashion Week in the coming years.
Fashion Week by the numbers
This week, more than 800 tubes of mascara will be used to glam up the models strutting down the largest runway in the country at New York Fashion Week. For just about 10 minutes each, designers display their most extravagant collections to buyers, the press, and the public. Part of the “Big Four,” including the upcoming event in Paris, New York was the first in the world to host what was called “Press Week” in 1943. Since then, Fashion Week has become a semiannual event where celebrities like Taylor Swift, Chrissy Teigen, and the entire Kardashian/Jenner clan are paid $100,000 to be present and fill their wardrobes with the most fashion-forward international styles of the season.
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Typically, the show in September features styles for spring and summer, allowing the general audience to plan ahead. This week, however, designers have been combining the collections to show clothes and accessories that will be available in retail stores in the next few weeks for the fall and winter seasons.
Methodology: The Trulia Fashion Index consists of metrics derived from Yelp data on local businesses and Trulia’s real estate listing data. For the first metric, we counted the number of businesses in Yelp that were categorized as fashion, personal shopping, or bespoke clothing. We controlled for how big each metro area is by dividing the total count of Yelp businesses related to fashion in each metro by the number of occupied households in each metro. For the second metric, we counted the number of real estate listings with descriptions containing typical fashion accessories, such as “walk-in closets” or “dressing rooms.” We ranked the top 100 metros by each of these two metrics. These two ranks were combined, weighted equally, to form our final index. The metro area definitions follow metropolitan divisions where available, then metropolitan statistical areas.
