Mapping the New York fashion scene, minute by minute

A new study uses social media to show how New York's fashion industry still centers on just a few blocks of Manhattan. A new study shows New York fashion designers don't just flock to trends: They also do nearly all their business within the confines of the city's historic Garment District. Study co-authors Sarah Williams of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett of the University of Southern California's Price School of Public Policy used the social networking app Foursquare to track the movements of fashion workers at apparel firms in the New York metropolitan area over a two-week period - an unprecedented use of social media and smartphones for such research. Their study, published today in the journal PLoS ONE , bears on the larger issue of proximity in urban economies, and suggests that having clusters of firms remains essential to economic activity - whether in New York or in rebuilding cities such as Detroit and Buffalo. The study's authors found that 77 percent of all trips made by fashion designers across the region, and 80 percent of business-related trips, were logged within the boundaries of the Garment District, showing the important role of the district in the production of their products. "Previous research has argued that proximity matters, using's and empirical research as evidence, but this study is the first where we were able to track where the workers were going in real-time," says Williams, who is the Ford Career Development Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at MIT.