This story is from July 2, 2017

The future of fashion: Think and you shall wear it

Cognitive-enabled devices are simulating human thought processes to precisely predict what clothing a person will like Wondering what to wear to office or which shirt to pair with your beige trouser or the foot wear that will go with your attire? Fret not.
The future of fashion: Think and you shall wear it
Representative image
Cognitive-enabled devices are simulating human thought processes to precisely predict what clothing a person will like
Wondering what to wear to office or which shirt to pair with your beige trouser or the foot wear that will go with your attire? Fret not.
From offering recommendations based on consumers' preferences, including their taste, style, budget, and so on, cognitive-enabled devices are simulating human thought processes to precisely predict what clothing a person will like, based on what complements the existing contents of hisher closet and preferences.

The very same capabilities are allowing online retailers to play the role of “virtual stylist“ by going beyond offering recommendations based on historical transactions and tailoring them according to individual likes and dislikes.
Welcome to the world of cognitive fashion where factors such as personality, gender, age, occasion, current season, weather, current fashion trends, current wardrobe, user style history, culture, affluence, browsing pattern etc. are being used to detect, track, and forecast fashion trends and cycles.
Recently, noted fashion designers Shane and Falguni Peacock used IBM Watson, a cognitive system, to create their new collection called
Future of Bollywood Fashion. To execute this vision, IBM Watson analysed around 6,00,000 fashion runway images for the past decade (2006-2017) spanning the `Big Four' fashion weeks (London, Paris, Milan, New York). It also analysed close to 5,000 Bollywood celebrity images from various social media sites, besides 3,000 fashion-related images in the form of movie posters across 4 decades, the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000.
“The analysis and insights were shared with the designers as an interactive web application hosted on IBM Cloud where they could explore the colour trends for the next season, analyse the key prints and silhouettes for each season and derive inspiration for their new collection,“ says Sriram Raghavan, director, IBM India Research Labs.
The dominant colour palette -raisin black, Yankees blue and light grey ­ IBM Watson came up with helped Shane and Falguni Peacock design their collection. “Without Watson, it would have taken us months to sift through thousands of images. Technology made our job easier and we could zero in on the colour trend for the next season,“ says Shane, who plans to stage another show merging fashion and technology in September. Noted fashion designer Prasad Bidapa too takes the help of technology to design his collec tion. “For example, when I design a N swimwear collec tion, AI helps me in the many technical aspects of design like fabric suitabili ty, wearer comfort and classic styles.
Since I design specifi cally for the South Asian figure, AI helps me grade and develop my styles in the correct measurements,“ he says.
For fashion retailers and designers, who have to conceptualise and design products six to nine months prior to the actual selling season, technological tools such as cognitive computing (sim ulation of the human thought process in a computerised model) and artificial intelligence (AI) have come in handy to feel the pulse of consumers, says Ganesh Subramanian, founder and CEO, stylumia.com, a company that helps fashion houses in forecasting trends. A few months back, online shopping website Myntra started an experiment to find out whether customers would wear a fully ma chine-generated brand without any human interven tion, “We launched ` M o d a R ap i d o ' brand of computer-generated T-shirts powered by AI. We started with 30 Tshirts and mixed them with our regular T-shirts. Surprisingly, all the 30 T-shirts vanished off our platform in a record time and we decided to come up with computer-generated fashions in jeans, kurtas and shoes,“ says Ambarish Kenghe, head, product technology, Myntra.
However, predicting what will actually click with customers is not an easy task. “We try to make use of technological aids such as big data, real-time analytics and AI to understand the personality of each and every customer on our platform like finding out individual brand affinity , size preference, preferred payment getway etc and try to offer him her as personalised an experience as possible,“ he says.
With technology becoming a part of the design process itself, fashion experts say, very soon it will be possible to design a customised dress based on one's smartphone data. Google and fashion house Ivyrevel are currently testing a “data-dress app“, which will be launched later this year.
So, will technology replace fashion designers in future? Bidapa thinks otherwise. “Technologies as are available now such as AI and cognitive computing can gauge the past, recycle fashion and handle retro fashion but I doubt whether they will be able to come up with the next big thing!“ But there's no denying the possibilities that intersection of science, fashion and technology can throw up.
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