Originally published August 2013. Updated June 2026.
Part of EPR's Clothing & Apparel Brand Communications hub · Related: Email Marketing for Fashion & Apparel — The 2026 Playbook · Influencer Marketing in 2026
In 2013, NetBase and Edison Research published "Social Channels of Influence for Apparel" — a study of more than 1,000 American women with at least one social media profile and how they used social channels to research clothing purchases. The finding then was that women trusted different channels for different apparel categories: blogs and message boards for career and special-occasion wear, friends for casual, friends and visuals for active and fitness. Twitter mattered for celebrity endorsements, not category research. Visual platforms mattered most across the board.
Thirteen years later, the channels have moved but the underlying behavior has not. Apparel buyers still consult different sources for different sub-categories. The sources have shifted — from blogs and message boards to TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, and the AI answer engines synthesizing across all of them. This piece is the 2013 NetBase finding read against 2026.
What the 2013 NetBase Study Found
The U.S. women's apparel category in 2013 was roughly $175 billion in annual sales. NetBase, in partnership with Edison Research, surveyed more than 1,000 American women with at least one active social media profile about how they used social channels in their apparel buying. Four findings anchored the report.
- Category dictates channel. Women trusted fashion experts on blogs and message boards for career and special-occasion clothing decisions. For casual clothing, they trusted friends. For active and fitness wear, they trusted a mix of friends and visual-platform content.
- Twitter was the celebrity channel, not the category channel. Twitter was the most logical place for celebrity endorsement work but did not drive apparel category research in any segment.
- Visual was the operating discipline. Image-led platforms outperformed text-led platforms in apparel discovery across every sub-category surveyed.
- Sub-category mattered as much as channel. Women relied on different influence channels depending on what they were buying. The marketer that treated "apparel" as one category was already behind the marketer who broke it into career, casual, occasion, and active sub-segments.
The 2013 takeaway: stop treating social as one channel and apparel as one category. Match the channel to the sub-category and the moment.
What Has Replaced Those Channels in 2026
The four 2013 findings still describe the underlying behavior. The channels carrying that behavior have shifted almost entirely.
Blogs and message boards have collapsed into Reddit and AI answer engines. The 2013 "fashion expert on a blog" is now a top-voted comment on r/femalefashionadvice, r/RedditLaqueristas-style category subreddits, or a synthesized answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The engines retrieve heavily from Reddit and the surviving category specialist sites (Who What Wear, The Strategist, Refinery29, Vogue Business, Business of Fashion). The fashion-expert-on-a-blog primitive moved; the influence pattern did not.
"Friends" has expanded into the parasocial creator economy. "Friends" in 2013 meant actual friends plus the early influencer set. In 2026 the same trust position is occupied by TikTok creators, Instagram Reels micro-influencers, and the YouTube fashion-haul ecosystem — relationships consumers treat as friendships even when they are one-way and monetized. The Tarte Bolivia 2024 episode, covered in EPR's Crisis PR pillar, sits inside this dynamic.
Visual platforms now define the category. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and increasingly the AI-generated try-on layers (Google's virtual try-on, Snap AR, brand-owned AR mirrors) carry the visual discovery the 2013 study identified as central. Visual-first is no longer a tactical choice — it is the category infrastructure.
Twitter / X is the cultural-moment channel, not the apparel channel. The 2013 finding held. X drives apparel commentary inside cultural moments (red carpets, Super Bowl, Met Gala, Fashion Week) but does not drive routine apparel category research. The platform serves the same narrow celebrity-and-cultural-moment function in 2026 as it did when the original study ran.
How Apparel Buyers Actually Research in 2026
The 2026 apparel buyer journey routes through five surfaces in sequence.
AI answer engines. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews synthesize the apparel research question and return a short recommendation list. "Best work pants for office in 2026," "best brand for petite athleisure," "is Aritzia worth it for the price" all return synthesized answers inside the engines, retrieving from Reddit, the surviving category specialist sites, and the brand-owned editorial layer.
TikTok and Reels. Discovery and validation. Buyers see a piece on TikTok or Reels, then search the brand or product specifically.
Reddit. Category-specific subreddits drive the highest-trust validation layer. r/femalefashionadvice, r/malefashionadvice, r/RedditLaqueristas, r/Sneakers, r/ThriftStoreHauls, and dozens of category-specific communities carry the "real owner sentiment" the engines treat as canonical.
Pinterest. The aspirational and outfit-building layer. Pinterest remains the dominant outfit-research surface for occasion, work, and seasonal buying.
Brand sites and direct retail. The conversion layer. The 2013 finding that women trusted brand-owned content least is still mostly true — brand sites convert demand generated upstream rather than creating it.
What This Means for Apparel Marketers
Three operational shifts follow from the 2013-to-2026 channel migration.
Reddit and AI engine retrieval are now primary infrastructure. Apparel brands that have been compounding owner sentiment on Reddit for the last five years (Aritzia, Vuori, Buck Mason, lululemon, the indie luxury cluster) win the AI engine retrieval surface. Brands with thin Reddit and AI presence — including most heritage department-store brands — are losing answer-space they used to own on category-defining queries.
The creator-as-friend dynamic is the trust unit. Effective apparel marketing now operates as creator partnerships at multiple scale tiers — macro for awareness, mid-tier for category authority, micro for community-specific validation. The 2013 "friends" finding now reads as a creator-economy operating manual.
Sub-category discipline still matters. The 2013 finding that apparel sub-categories require different channels is sharper in 2026, not softer. Career wear, athleisure, occasion wear, casual, and outerwear each pull from a distinct mix of AI engines, Reddit communities, TikTok hashtag clusters, and Pinterest board patterns. Brands that treat apparel as one category lose to brands that operate sub-category-specific communications strategies.
For the full 2026 fashion landscape — luxury conglomerates, athletic anchors, heritage and American casual, DTC and digital-native, and ultra-fast fashion — see EPR's Clothing & Apparel Brand Communications hub.
