Fashion trends can accurately predict which part of a city a person comes from, according to new research. What you wear can also show whether a person thinks of themselves as trendy or progressive as well as what is happening in the city at that time as predicted by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. Computer scientists have been able to automatically draw'underground maps' that can accurately segment cities into areas with similar fashion sense. Style can also predict interests, discover events and forecast fashion trends in certain areas of the city, according to anthropologists. The research uses a fashion recognition algorithm on photographs geolocated from 37 large cities and then the typical combination of those styles within a given radius.

When it comes to fashion, we can all use a little help. Of course, having a personal stylist is the dream, but the next-best thing is Amazon's Echo Look. The Echo Look snaps selfies at your command. Its voice-controlled selfie cam takes full-body shots and short videos so you can see how your outfit look from all angles. In our testing, the images were excellent even in low light conditions.

Alicia Silverstone's bubble-headed Cher, from the 1995 comedy Clueless, would go gonzo over Amazon's hands-free camera, the Echo Look. She said in the film: "I don't rely on mirrors, so I always take Polaroids." That girl knew a mirror distorts your image, but a picture--or, better yet, a video clip--gives you a pretty good idea of how your clothing looks to other people. The Echo Look is a $200 voice-activated camera that snaps full-body photos and six-second video clips of your daily looks. It comes with a companion app that does two things: It tracks what you wear each day, and it uses that information to offer up fashion advice (including suggestions of complementary togs you can buy from Amazon). Announced in April 2017, but until recently available for purchase only by invitation, the Look is a significant departure from the rest of the Echo lineup.

Artificial intelligence might just spawn a whole new style trend: call it "predictive fashion." In a paper published on the ArXiv, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Adobe have outlined a way for AI to not only learn a person's style but create computer-generated images of items that match that style. The system could let retailers create personalized pieces of clothing, or could even be used to help predict broader fashion trends. First, the researchers trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn and classify a user's preferences for certain items, using purchase data scraped from Amazon in six categories: shoes, tops, and pants for both women and men. This type of recommender model is common in the online retail world, usually showing up in an "Other items you might like" area at the bottom of a page.