Create Fashion Fingerprints with R

How do you summarize fashion? For New York Fashion Week, the New York Times used the idea of "Fashion Fingerprints", distilling a designer's collections into small fragments highlighting the palette. Here's what Marc Jacobs' current collection looks like:

Click through for an interactive version where you can explore each design, and scroll down to the bottom where you can see even greater distillation: each designer represented as abstract color blocks, with colors represented from head to toe.

R user Giuseppe Paleologo noted that R is ideally suited to a task like this. In fact, it took him less than 10 minutes to create a prototype function in R, and less than an hour to create a clean working function. The actual code is less than 20 lines, and you can use it to process 2000 images in less than a minute. Here's the result:

You can find the R code that created this image, and more information about how it works, at the link below.

gappy3000: R is in fashion (via the author)