When Technology Creates Fashion
“Falguni and Shane have not shied away from experimentation since the inception of their fashion house thirteen years ago in 2004. Their designs, which are a fusion of Indian colours and sensibilities with a western silhouette have had fans in the likes of Alia Bhatt, Sonam Kapoor, and international stars like Beyonce, Rihanna, Katy Perry, among others.”
“For their new three-piece collection, the duo decided to experiment with IBM’s new artificial intelligence programme, IBM Watson. IBM Watson is a cognitive system enabling a new partnership between people and computers. The supercomputer or AI has numerous applications, one of them can be aiding fashion designers.”
“The supercomputer or AI has numerous applications, one of them can be aiding fashion designers.”
“The AI helped the fashion duo create their new collection called Future of Bollywood Fashion by analysing around 600,000 publicly available historical fashion runway images for the past decade (2006-2017) spanning the ‘Big Four’ fashion weeks (London, Paris, Milan, New York). In order to understand Bollywood fashion trends, IBM Watson analysed close to 50,000 Bollywood celebrity images from various social media sites, besides 3,000 fashion-related images from the history of Bollywood in the form of Bollywood movie posters across 4 decades, the 1970s, 80s, 90s and 2000+. The first data source is representative of high-end couture and the second one is more indicative of Bollywood-centric fashion across the years.”
“They came up with the dominant colour palette which helped them design their collection: raisin black, Yankees blue and light grey”.
“Sriram Raghavan, director, India Research Labs, who is responsible creating the AI said, “Fashion is highly visual and has its own nuances; for example when understanding natural images, we found that humans use only around 10-20 colour terms. However, once we moved to the domain of fashion, there were thousands of colours. We have developed deep-learning capabilities that can understand a fashion image and identify multiple key aspects that constitute it. Using these tools we were able to analyse the collection of fashion images to ascertain popular and trending colours for every season over a decade, and then predict the trending colours for the next season.”
“This is not the only use of AI and fashion though. Sriram Raghavan, Director, India Research Labs, who is responsible creating the AI said, “IBM Watson can also be used to maximize the shopping experience. You can help the buyer get the same experience they get at a high end store of a customised shopping experience where you get personal attention.”
NEW YORK TIMES FEATURE
