CAT STREET: Chronicle Archive of Tokyo Street-fashion

The analysis of daily life fashion trends can help us understand our societies and human cultures profoundly. However, no appropriate database exists that includes images illustrating what people wore in their daily lives over an extended period. In this study, we propose a new fashion image archive, Chronicle Archive of Tokyo Street-fashion (CAT STREET), to shed light on daily life fashion trends. CAT STREET includes images showing what people wore in their daily lives during the period 1970-2017, and these images contain timestamps and street location annotations. This novel database enables us to observe long-term daily life fashion trends using quantitative methods. To evaluate the potential of our database, we corroborated the rules-of-thumb for two fashion trend phenomena, namely how economic conditions affect fashion style share in the long term and how fashion styles emerge in the street and diffuse from street to street. Our findings show that the Conservative style trend, a type of luxury fashion style, is affected by economic conditions. We also introduce four cases of how fashion styles emerge in the street and diffuse from street to street in fashion-conscious streets in Tokyo. Our study demonstrates CAT STREET's potential to promote understanding of societies and human cultures through quantitative analysis of daily life fashion trends.