It's hard to find a truly definitive list these days. We are obsessed with ranking everything (a list of lost grocery lists, anyone?), and even when it's not weird (say you decide to list the best episodes of Buffy), prepare for a lot of Twitter threads telling you why you're wrong. For this reason, I'm a big fan of hard data that you can't dispute and isn't subjective. It might be the boring Capricorn in me, but I love it when you can clearly see what people have genuinely put their faith into. One list that adheres to my data-driven criteria is Lyst's quarterly index reports.
The global fashion search platform regularly reveals the products most people have bought over a three-month period. To work this out, Lyst looks at the online shopping behaviour of more than nine million shoppers a month searching, browsing and buying fashion across 12,000 designers and stores online. The formula behind The Lyst Index takes into account global Lyst and Google search data, conversion rates and sales, as well as brand and product social media mentions and engagement statistics worldwide over this three-month period.