On the 29th and 30th of October2018, in the french city of Roubaix, CARLIN CREATIVE TREND BUREAU was a partner of the Fashion Tech Days,the national B to Bevent about innovation in the fashion industry. This year’s theme was the coexistence between small structures and world giants within a market that must adapt itself to a more demanding and more diverse clientele. In this context, the multiple possibilities offered by Artificial Intelligence to fashion were reviewed.
But what do we mean exactly by “Artificial Intelligence”or “AI”?
According to Jean-Claude Heudin, director of the research laboratory of the IIM (Institute of Internet and Multimedia) AI consist in the implementation “of a number of techniques allowing machines to imitate a form of real intelligence”. Thus, AI would be a set of processes allowing the automatization of technical tasks. There are not one but many specialized AI that we can find in numerous aspects of the fashion field.
Customers can browse through looks on smart mirrors and check store inventory on their smartphones. livemint.com Photo: Bloomberg
Regarding the customer service, we find AI via chatbots and digital assistants, which automate the customers assistance in their process of ordering online. Launched by the start-up DealOnin 2017, Alixis an example of a chatbot (available on Facebook Messenger) accompanying men consumers during their purchases of clothes and fashion accessories.
But the impact of AI on fashion is not limited to customer service. On the sellers side, the bad communication due to the absence of a standardized product catalogue is a real brake on the relations between suppliers and distributors. AI can mitigate this lack, with for example,the case of the start-up Scalia, a platform allowing the distributors to reduce by 90% their average creation time of a product sheet, while increasing their quality and thus their referencing.
On the consumers side, AI propose products recommendations to Internet users. Amazon goes even further with Echo Look, its stylist assistant designed to analyze your daily look via a camera and help you to dress better, according to the “style” analyzed before hand with your data.
Amazon – Echo Look
Finally, on the designers side, AI represents a powerful tool to analyse numerous data, such as “videos, e-commerce websites, comments on social networks and consumer behaviors (clicks, researches). This analysis allows AI to reveal trends (colors, fabrics, cuttings) and even to anticipate them”, explains Ganesh Subramanian, co-founder of Stylumia. By allowing a finer reading of consumers desires, AI becomes a tool of creation. It is also used to realize benchmarks, analyze competitors (an offer proposed by the start-ups Daco and Retviews), and allows companies to propose a more relevant offer on the market.
Regarding the creative process, the machine cannot replace the creative genius of the designer but it can feed his inspiration, by increasing the number of possibilities which humans are capable of considering. It is for example the mentality of Stitch Fix, an e-commerce website whose modelis based on a combination between advices of human stylists and Data Intelligence.
The fashion industry is a sector which inevitably has to evolve. It has to know and learn how to produce less and better. AI offers possibilities for significant customization, for better quality production and thus for waste reduction.
AI does not replace human intelligence but supports it and increases it: algorithms and human intuition unite to offer the fashion industry a necessary evolution and the possibility of a sustainable future.
