Digitalization has completely changed the whole concept of fashion week. It has made fashion fast to the effect that what is truly new is difficult to say. Thousands of runway images flood online and fill our feeds. Fashionistas consume them fast, and move beyond them even faster and what designers will show for Spring-Summer 2018 will be replicated by Hight-Street brands and hang on the racks within fortnight of the showing.
With the start of New York Fashion Week the Spring 2018 season takes off. Over the next month and half New York,London, Milan and Paris will have close to 500 designers showcasing their Spring-Summer 2018 collections to the world. Over the past decade, the changes in the fashion industry have been stark. To tackle them, computer software have been built to understand hot-selling styles (and styles that don’t) and how consumer friendly the pricing is. This made fashion too fast, too stressful for the designers and had unplesant effect on the industry.
This time ARITIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is being used in New York Fashion Week to understand trends. Top fashion houses have data scientists who will be using AI to make sense of everything that’s going on across these shows. Data scientists have built ‘deep learning’ models that will not only process thousands of runway images, but actually see, and give value to, components within them.This is engineered by encoding the space within a runway image, attributing a reference point to everything the machine sees, whether it is color, texture, print or form.
When a fashion critic is asked to summarise a Fashion Week, they go through every image from every collection, taking notes and making personal biases and assumptions along the way. But now with AI, within seconds, Bots could generate five composite silhouettes, colors and prints which distill the essence of all the designers whould be showing at the New York Fashion Week. Add to that – no bias, no preference, just fact.
Scarry!!!