On Saturday, renowned designer Kate Barton will present a new collection during New York Fashion Week with a significant technology twist: she has teamed up with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI assistant based on IBM watsonx in the IBM Cloud. This assistant helps guests identify items from the collection and try them on virtually.
TechCrunch spoke with Barton and Ganesh Harinat, founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, ahead of the show to learn more about the presentation.
“Today, technology is a tool for expanding the world around clothing – how it’s presented, how the viewer enters into the story, and how we create that moment when a look is read twice by the gaze.”
Concept of the presentation and the technological foundation
According to Barton, technology is integrated into her thinking: she loves working with a blend of real and virtual, and applying AI elements in design creates so-called a portal into the world of the collection, not “AI for AI’s sake.”
“Today, technology is a tool for expanding the world around clothing, how it’s presented, how the viewer enters into the story, and how we create that moment when the gaze makes a double “re-reading” of the look,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the collection’s aim is to spark curiosity.
Harinat noted that his company used IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Object Storage to realize Barton’s presentation. It was a production activation with a visual AI interface built on IBM watsonx that recognizes items from the collection, answers questions in any language via voice and text, and offers photorealistic virtual fittings.
“The hardest part wasn’t tuning the models; it was orchestration,”
“This isn’t the first time Barton has added a technological tint to fashion – in a previous season she also experimented with AI models in collaboration with Fiducia AI.”
During Fashion Week there were discussions about whether brands would adopt technology and AI. Barton believes that many brands are already using AI, mostly in operational aspects, but not always publicly: “Perhaps fewer of them are using it publicly due to potential reputational risk.”
“Perhaps fewer of them are using it publicly due to potential reputational risk,”
Barton compares the current situation to the early days of the Internet, when many big fashion names were anxious about launching websites: “Then it became inevitable, and the question changed from ‘do we need to be online’ to ‘is our online presence good?’”
Harinat adds that many brands are testing AI, but its implementation often remains superficial – chatbots, content generation, and internal productivity tools.
“Most of this technology already exists – the differentiator now is gathering the right partners and building teams that can implement this responsibly,”
Despite some tension regarding the pace of adoption, AI is becoming a more familiar part of fashion, and such shows may become the norm. According to Harinat, by 2028 AI in fashion will become more “normalized,” and as early as 2023 he had already seen it as part of the retail sector’s operational core.
“The most important thing right now is to assemble the right partners and build teams that can responsibly implement this,”
Di Waddell, Global Head of Consumer, Travel and Transportation Industries at IBM Consulting, shared: “When inspiration, product intelligence, and interaction are connected in real time, AI turns an element into a growth engine that delivers measurable competitive advantage” – TechCrunch.
“When inspiration, product intelligence and interaction are connected in real time, AI moves from a feature to a growth engine that delivers measurable competitive advantage,”
“The near future of fashion isn’t automated fashion, but fashion that uses new tools to elevate craftsmanship, deepen storytelling, and bring more people into the experience without diminishing the people who create it” – Barton sums up.
Thus, the New York event promises to fuse craft with cutting-edge technologies: it’s not just a collection presentation but an experiment in new forms of interaction between fashion, artificial intelligence, and the audience experience. Further updates are expected on the integration of IBM watsonx and Fiducia AI in future shows and on how such AI solutions will influence the consumer experience in the world of fashion.