About

Professor Van Dyk Lewis is associated with the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research at Cornell University. The center assists faculty in developing translational research projects, providing support such as proposal preparation, training, technical support, and facilitating collaborative relationships. The center also offers workshops, an intensive summer institute, and talks on current research topics, aiming to enhance the impact and dissemination of research findings. While specific details about Professor Lewis's individual research focus or background are not provided on the page, his affiliation with the center indicates a commitment to advancing translational research through support, training, and collaborative efforts at Cornell University.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Data Mining
• History
• Archaeology
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Engineering
• Industrial engineering
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Fiat Fashion: An Exploratory Study on the Construction of a Price Index for Luxury Fashion Sold at Auction

  Luxury · 2023-09-02

  articleSenior author

  This study situates fashion history in the context of art market research to explore the assetization of luxury clothing. Art markets and the luxury fashion industry developed in tandem and yet there have been no cultural economic studies on fashion as a form of art. This study takes a data driven approach to assessing the monetary value of clothing sold at auction at Christie's primarily in the twenty first century. The results of this study confirm with a high degree of statistical significance that fashion auctions at Christie's, Inc. auction house have become increasingly lucrative since the twentieth century. Moreover, the results of this study show that there is a statistically significant financial incentive to purchase and hold onto certain luxury clothing items from the canons of fashion history. This study provides a baseline on which to explore increasingly atomized configurations of value with respect to material culture from fashion history.

  PublisherDOI

• Using autopoiesis to discover the birth of fashion

  Fashion Style & Popular Culture · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  How personal and social fashion might be formed at a nascent level is detectable in the Mursi and Omo people. These groups remained within the African continent after its post-Pangaea formation; the Mursi and Omo have retained practices and beliefs that hitherto have not been considered critical to the formation of fashion. Fashion scholarship has followed a limited version of history that permeates museology, teaching and fashion design. Its impetus responds to the idea that fashion was formed in Bruges, Belgium, during the birth of capitalism, between 1280 and 1390. Clothes created before 1280 in non-European settings has generally been regarded as costume, hence the epistemological gap that stymies an inclusivity scholarship. This development has ramifications for a reconsideration of when the historical gaze commences, and where geographically it falls. Indeed, fashion is reconsidered to be inordinately autochthonous. This is an examination of post-structuralism as applied to a visual system via human presentation and social autopoiesis, a system that reproduces itself and does so without requiring external operations for the system for continuation. The activity of fashion visualized is examined as a claim of a live system that stresses the study of the individual and the group as an activity for self-actualization. The relative freedom in which the Mursi and Omo peoples of Ethiopia create fashion is discussed as opposed to the lack of autonomy available to formal fashion designers working in the West and particularly those being trained and educated in fashion schools. This article refutes Barthesian concepts of fashion for three reasons. First, Barthes grounded his scope within the venture of the fashion industrial complex and its profit agenda, served by mechanisms such as fashion photography, advertising and promotion. Second, Barthes’ work concerns an exposition of semiotics where fashion is merely the subject of containment. Lastly, the establishment of fashion is a creative act concerning the human body, since no evidence can be proffered to decipher which came first – human making marks on the land, trees or cave walls, or mark-making on live human skin. I proceed with the idea that the Omo provide a glimpse of the birth of fashion in that they make the step of distancing themselves from nature by re-creating themselves as objectified and in the world.

  PublisherDOI

• The exploration of artificial intelligence application in fashion trend forecasting

  Textile Research Journal · 2021 · 42 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  Fashion trends today are changing much faster than ever before. Timely and reliable trend forecasting is, therefore, critical in the fashion industry. Traditional fashion forecasting requires professionals to abstract image-based information across design collections and time intervals from around the world, which is extremely time-consuming and labor intensive. Considering the financial cost associated with manual labeling and the accuracy of classifications based upon human subjective judgment, this explorative study proposes a data-driven quantitative abstracting approach using an artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm. Firstly, an A.I. model was trained to be familiar with fashion images from a large-scale dataset under different scenarios such as online stores and street snapshots; secondly, the model could detect garments and classify clothing attributes such as fabric textures, garment style, and design details from runway photos and videos; thirdly, the model could summarize fashion trends from the attributes it developed. The adoption of an A.I. algorithm proved to be an objective and systematic computerized method of interpreting fashion dynamics in a more efficient, accurate, sustainable, and cost-effective way.

  PublisherDOI

• Using Artificial Intelligence to Analyze Fashion Trends

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2020 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Analyzing fashion trends is essential in the fashion industry. Current fashion forecasting firms, such as WGSN, utilize the visual information from around the world to analyze and predict fashion trends. However, analyzing fashion trends is time-consuming and extremely labor intensive, requiring individual employees' manual editing and classification. To improve the efficiency of data analysis of such image-based information and lower the cost of analyzing fashion images, this study proposes a data-driven quantitative abstracting approach using an artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm. Specifically, an A.I. model was trained on fashion images from a large-scale dataset under different scenarios, for example in online stores and street snapshots. This model was used to detect garments and classify clothing attributes such as textures, garment style, and details for runway photos and videos. It was found that the A.I. model can generate rich attribute descriptions of detected regions and accurately bind the garments in the images. Adoption of A.I. algorithm demonstrated promising results and the potential to classify garment types and details automatically, which can make the process of trend forecasting more cost-effective and faster.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An inclusive system for fashion criticism

  International Journal of Fashion Design Technology and Education · 2017-02-20 · 15 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper serves to uncover fashion criticism as a discursive network which situates fashion in the system that goes alongside but is also different from art. In developing a cogent discourse, three types of elucidation are suggested. First, the authors identify topographies of fashion as they evolve as aesthetic components inherent in the structure of fashion. Notably, these topographies are socio-economic structures of collective fashion agents within the fashion system and are eventual cultural discourses. Second, fashion criticism is defined as linguistic analysis and interpretation of a variety of discussions around fashion and an aesthetic analysis of it. Against a lack of critical approaches to fashion, we argue that fashion criticism should be systematised as existing alongside art criticism and be reflective of fashion’s multiple facets. Third, the authors suggest an inclusive criticism model for fashion that incorporates aesthetic, socio-economic, and cultural perspectives.

  PublisherDOI

• Politics of Appropriation in Dress

  2017-01-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Conflict between perceptions of correct or incorrect appearances are at the core of the decision process. How individuals internalize and process conflicts is determined in expectations of far reaching critical analysis of oneself and one's culture and society. Instinctive judgements are mediated through the onslaught of images, data, and opinions from outside one's preferred realm, these realms provide a further collection of knowledge, but not necessarily the decondition of perspective. It is crucial to understand the agenda of dressing in terms of territories we operate in and those that are used by others. This research is a psychological analysis of the way people make judgements concerning clothed appearances. A core component in this research is a consideration of how consciousness is developed, and how evaluative methods influence everyday decisions about the appearance of others contribute towards how judgements are ranked and react to in the social setting.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Patrick Kelly: Fashions’ great black hope

  Fashion Style & Popular Culture · 2015-07-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract When blackness is received by an industrial cultural organization it is subject to degradation of meaning and effect. Black designers wishing to operate in the upper echelons of the fashion industry must reconnoiter their positions by employing self-sabotage and offer less potent versions of operational blackness. This article unpacks how blackness is operated and mythologized within the Parisian fashion system. The authors investigate Patrick Kelly’s passage from obscurity to prominence as being in keeping with the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. The importance of this unpacking is timely as black fashion designers are increasingly breaching an exclusion zone that placed them formally outside the mainstream fashion system.

  PublisherDOI

• Fashion cultures in a small town: An analysis of fashion- and place-making

  Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty · 2013-10-01 · 6 citations

  article

  Abstract In her introduction to this issue, Kaiser advances a perspective that highlights dimensions of place and time in a dynamic and non-stereotypical way. Rather than treating these dimensions as background factors in the architecture of interaction context, she critically unpacks the ways in which time and place impact individual and collective fashion meanings. In our article we draw on Kaiser’s focus by using ethnographic methods to investigate how fashion is ‘produced’ to convey identification with place, group and/or a temporary alliance in a rural community where landscape is constitutive of social configurations and the student population is always transient. To that end we replace the notion of fixed visual identities with phatic communities, which are ad hoc groupings sharing a cause or a circumstance (Tseëlon 2010). Next, we address the problem of how to preserve the meanings and looks of ad hoc fashions, which exist in a constant state of change. We apply the logic of phatic communities to the building of a museum collection, which has to meet the challenge of capturing a fleeting and evolving phenomenon without freezing it into fixed categories. Contrary to the logic of traditional museums, a museum documenting ongoing clothing changes invites a different mode of engagement: one that is participatory and interactive. Finally, our conception of the sartorial museum, which documents changing time in a particular place, replaces the notion of the museum as a ‘space of death’ with the notion of a ‘space of regeneration’. The regeneration is the recycling, which repositions clothes in a ‘second life’.

  PublisherDOI

• Music and Fashion

  The Berg Companion to Fashion · 2010-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The relationship between fashion and popular music is one of abundant and mutual creativity. Reciprocal influences have resulted in some of the most dynamic apparel visualizations ever created in popular culture. Some exist as memorable creations for the stage and music video; others become long-las

  PublisherDOI

• Hip-Hop Fashion

  The Berg Companion to Fashion · 2010-01-01 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Hip-hop is both the voice of alienated, frustrated youth and a multibillion-dollar cultural industry packaged and marketed on a global scale. Hip-hop is also a multifaceted subculture that transcends many of the popular characterizations used to describe other music-led youth cultures. One of the im

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Susan P. Ashdown

  13 shared

• Suzanne Loker

  9 shared

• Lindsay M. Lyman-Clarke

  Cornell University

  8 shared

• Adriana Petrova

  4 shared

• Jack R. Smith

  University of York

  2 shared

• W. Aldrich

  Quorn (United Kingdom)

  2 shared

• Mengyun Shi

  2 shared

• Jongsuk Chun

  2 shared