Pinterest Enhances Search Functionality to Improve Accessibility to Plus-Size Fashion
In an effort to better reflect its user base, Pinterest is once again modifying its search algorithm. The recent update focuses on enhancing the prominence of plus-size fashion and other fashion styles that showcase a wider range of body shapes and sizes.
With the changes, searches for women’s fashion and wedding looks will bring up results with more diverse body types, Pinterest says. Annie Ta, director of inclusive products at Pinterest, said the changes came from the realization that many users were adding “descriptions and attributes” to their queries to find the styles that best fit their needs. “They experienced something really similar: recommendations that were homogenous and not very different,” he said.
This isn’t the first time Pinterest has taken steps toward more comprehensive search features. The company, which built a reputation as a gentle social media company, added skin tone filtering to makeup and other beauty-related searches in 2018 and introduced hair texture search in 2020.
It took a similar approach when looking for ways to tweak its algorithm to produce results that were more inclusive of the plus-size community. Ha says Pinterest’s algorithm has been trained on more than 5 billion images and videos on its platform to recognize and categorize different body shapes and sizes. The company also asked plus-size community advocates and creators for advice on the changes. Now users should be able to browse styles better without adding extra search terms like “curvy” or “plus size”.
According to Ha, early results suggest the feature is effective. He says that the representation of different body types in women’s fashion search results has improved more than four times since the introduction of algorithmic adjustments. While the changes are limited to women’s fashion and wedding-related content for now, he says the company is working to expand the representation of body types into other categories as well.
