Fashion’s year of the steampunk

If you haven’t seen fashion inspired by "steampunk"—a sort of Victorian-era, industrial-meets-modern-punk look—you will in 2013. That’s according to a style intelligence source that might surprise you: IBM.

Big Blue is into big data, and the company has been conducting social media analytics, culling through a half million public posts on message boards, blogs, social media sites and news sources for its Birth of a Trend project, to figure out which fashion trends are next to pop. Steampunk has risen to the top. After starting out as sub-genre of science fiction literature, the look has rippled across social media platforms over the past three years and into the consciousness of the fashion crowd, says Trevor Davis, IBM’s consumer product expert for its global business services division.

"The name was first used in 1987—before I started looking at this—but what happened was we started picking up that people were talking about steampunk as related to fashion in 2009," Davis tells Upstart Business Journal. "People were starting to dress up and make their own clothing and accessories with a steampunk look."

Over the past four years, the chatter around steampunk has increased twelve-fold, which is big, but not obvious. Still, since 2010, more than two dozen U.S. department stores and specialty retailers have become what IBM has called "steampunk savvy." Over the next two years, IBM (NYSE: IBM) predicts that steampunk will shift from low volume, high-cost "craft" manufacturing to mass production with major fashion labels, accessories providers and jewelry makers expected to jump aboard.

So what exactly is the look? It’s a combination of high-end Victorian fashion (think corsets and dresses with full skirts) with industrial hardware motifs from the steam engine era with the look of old-fashioned military uniforms thrown in for good measure. The "punk" aspect brings it into the modern age, with more skin shown, and a sexier look too.

Although women seem to have taken to the aesthetic more than men (it’s generated a lot of interest on Pinterest), the style has also crossed gender boundaries. Steampunk-inspired looks, for example, appeared on the Prada runway in its 2012 autumn/winter collection for men, says Davis, who—incidentally— has landed at a fitting juncture with his IBM career. He’s a former teen model who later became a research scientist with a quantitative background.

"I was very tempted by the Prada collection, but it’s a bit outside my budget," he said.

Some other IBM stats: 33 percent of online fashion chatter around steampunk can be found on gaming sites and 63 percent of fashion discussions around steampunk are initiated by people younger than 30. Twitter is the No. 1 social network for steampunk chatter, hosting six times the number of discussions as Facebook, and steampunk-inspired ComicCon events in October 2010 in New York City sent the chatter levels soaring by 296 percent. More than half—55 percent—of social sentiment chatter for steampunk fashion came from blogs.

What does IBM do with this information? It provides information to companies to help them get to these below-the-surface trends first. While Davis wouldn’t disclose which clients he is working with, he says that large, fast-moving consumer goods companies, apparel brands, and major international and national retailers are among them.

They are companies that would have relied on trendspotters in the past, but what’s interesting here is that the trends are beginning in street style, then moving to couture, and then on to mass retail. If you can catch a trend when it starts bubbling up on the street level you’re onto something profitable. The information that IBM is collecting now has really only been available in the last few years, which is why the company jumped into it.

So what other trends are out there? Davis isn’t saying yet, so for now, assume that bustier tops, leather goggles and military jackets will still get you into the clubs.