If the Lyst Index makes you angry, you don't understand how it works Let's take stock of what the “Lyst Index” is and what it says

Since its debut in 2017, the quarterly Lyst Index report has become for many a way to turn the fashion market trend into a competitive sport. The press loves it, brands proudly follow it (when they are at the top of the list), and many insiders consider it a market thermometer. But the latest quarterly report, released yesterday, has sparked several controversies, especially for the inclusion of Burberry in the ranking, a brand that many believe is not really the 17th most searched in the world. Two of the most outspoken voices in the online fashion-sphere, Boringnotcom and Louis Pisano, even defined the ranking as manipulated if not outright fabricated, and in the comment sections of their respective posts, many expressed skepticism towards the quarterly ranking. The problem is therefore methodological: while Lyst user data can be trusted, things become murkier when it comes to the analysis related to the growth of brand account followers, mentions across various platforms, brands and related keywords, as well as sentiment and searches in the databases of 12,000 boutiques and online stores. «The Lyst Index is a quarterly ranking of the most popular brands and products in the fashion world, compiled by Lyst, the world's largest and smartest fashion shopping platform», reads at the beginning of each report. «The formula behind the Lyst Index takes into account Lyst shoppers' behavior, including searches inside and outside the platform, product views, and sales. To monitor brand and product popularity, the formula also incorporates social media mentions, global activity, and engagement statistics over a three-month period.» But what exactly does this mean?

Last January, the ranking’s creator, Katy Lubin, VP of Brand & Communications for Lyst, said the company does not reveal the secret formula of its algorithm but specified that the analysis includes data gathered from users on the marketplace platform, which «connects» the world's leading multi-brand fashion retailers, and data on brand engagement and mentions on social media. The process involves large-scale language models, various data analysis fields, and so on. But it may be appropriate to specify the limitations of this Lyst Index which, for example, based on multi-brand store data does not take into account sales in boutiques or on brand e-commerce sites (all data that Lyst does not know before it is publicly reported by the groups themselves) and generally direct sales channels. As some may not know, in the last ten years or so, more and more major brands have withdrawn from wholesale channels, some have never entered multi-brand stores, and others, like Chanel, do not even have e-commerce. It is no coincidence that several brands such as Chanel, but also Hermès or Brunello Cucinelli, are never present and that others, like Dior or Louis Vuitton, are relatively absent despite selling billions – apart from occasional appearances. Another structural limitation is the fact that the data come only from the Lyst platform, excluding any form of external competition (like Farfetch, Yoox, Zalando), thus building a sample inherently not representative of the global market. The approach is Lyst-centric and, although rich in digital signals, cannot offer a complete snapshot of the fashion system. It is no surprise that many insiders in the system feel a slight aversion toward the weight the ranking holds in the sector and the kind of competitiveness it has unleashed.

Another issue concerns the nature of online searches. In the Google Play Store, the app description itself says it is «to find all the best fashion deals». It can be inferred that the platform’s users do not belong to the high-spending segment that actually purchases full-price fashion or from local boutiques but rather to the crowd of aspirational customers who are just browsing or looking for the best deals. This means that the data collected by Lyst do not necessarily reflect the actual purchasing behavior of the luxury audience, but rather a dynamic of desire, curiosity, and potential consumption. The index measures digital attention, not actual purchasing power — and is therefore closer to a hype thermometer than an analytical tool. Added to this is the predominance of social virality among the factors considered: likes, mentions, shares, engagement. It is a system that tends to reward media noise rather than strategic consistency, favoring highly exposed brands and penalizing more established brands that are less “Instagrammable.” Another critical element concerns the absence of financial indicators in the data mix: revenues, organic growth, profitability, and margins are not considered. A brand can therefore gain positions in the Lyst Index even if it is losing money or undergoing restructuring, simply thanks to a temporary increase in online attention. Moreover, the exact weighting of the collected data is not made public: no one knows for sure what weight clicks, searches, views, or time spent on pages carry.

Finally, it enters what can be defined as a self-referential loop. As Lubin explained, what once began as a sort of quarterly «scientific bulletin» has in a few years become a kind of market referee that, despite its vocation for objectivity, has the power to influence sales and spending patterns of the fashion insiders who follow it, to make a product category explode on the market, to create discussions in boardrooms and quarterly earnings calls. Lubin also implies that numerous CEOs and top fashion executives call her directly to complain that their brand has fallen too much and that the ranking has become a sort of compass for various marketing and strategy teams. In other words, the index not only photographs the market: it actively contributes to shaping it, triggering reactive mechanisms that amplify its impact. The more brands follow it and adjust accordingly, the more the Lyst Index becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.