  The fashion industry is establishing its presence on a number of
visual-centric social media like Instagram. This creates an interesting clash
as fashion brands that have traditionally practiced highly creative and
editorialized image marketing now have to engage with people on the platform
that epitomizes impromptu, realtime conversation. What kinds of fashion images
do brands and individuals share and what are the types of visual features that
attract likes and comments? In this research, we take both quantitative and
qualitative approaches to answer these questions. We analyze visual features of
fashion posts first via manual tagging and then via training on convolutional
neural networks. The classified images were examined across four types of
fashion brands: mega couture, small couture, designers, and high street. We
find that while product-only images make up the majority of fashion
conversation in terms of volume, body snaps and face images that portray
fashion items more naturally tend to receive a larger number of likes and
comments by the audience. Our findings bring insights into building an
automated tool for classifying or generating influential fashion information.
We make our novel dataset of {24,752} labeled images on fashion conversations,
containing visual and textual cues, available for the research community.
