Measurement and Analysis of China’s Fashion Events on Social Media: A Study of Shanghai Fashion Week

China’s fashion industry is growing vigorously and online social media provides an important platform to promote events and organize activities. However, there is very little existing work utilizing social media data to analyse the important events in China’s fashion industry. In order to fill this gap, we take Shanghai Fashion Week and Weibo as examples to propose a new framework of studying events in China’s fashion industry through online social media. We capture a comprehensive and open source Weibo dataset focused on Shanghai Fashion Week and conduct two main studies on that basis. On one hand, we study the economic influence of Shanghai Fashion Week by focusing on the consumption level of the users interested in it. We propose a new method to calculate Weibo users’ consumption level based on Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). On the other hand, we use LSTM to obtain the interested users’ main focuses on the market by multi-classifying their posts and characterize Shanghai Fashion Week’s market attractiveness based on the results. The analysis results show that the economic influence and market attractiveness of Shanghai Fashion Week are expanding year by year, and data analysis of domestic social media like Weibo can provide strong reference for understanding the development trends of China’s fashion industry.