On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will unveil her latest collection at New York Fashion Week — with a twist, of course. Barton teamed up with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM Watsonx on IBM Cloud) to help guests identify pieces of the collection and try them on virtually.
TechCrunch caught up with Barton and Ganesh Harinath, the founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, before the show to learn more about the presentation.
For one, Barton said technology is baked into how she thinks. She likes playing with the real and the unreal, and found the idea of using AI-like set design, “a portal into the collection’s world, rather than ‘AI for AI’s sake,” she said.
“Today, tech is a tool for expanding the world around the clothes, how they are presented, and how people enter the story, and how we create that moment when your eyes do a double-take,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the goal for this collection was to create a sense of curiosity.
Harinath said his company used IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage to help pull off Barton’s presentation. It was a production-grade activation with a Visual AI lens (built with IBM watsonx) that detects pieces from Barton’s new collection. It can answer questions in any language via voice and text and offers photorealistic virtual reality try-ons.
“The hardest work wasn’t model tuning; it was orchestration,” he told TechCrunch. This isn’t the first time Barton has put a technological spin on her fashion — last season, she experimented with AI models, also in collaboration with Fiduicia AI.
At fashion week, there was some chatter about whether brands — and, if so, which ones — would be using technology and artificial intelligence. Barton thinks many brands are using AI, though quietly, mainly in operations. “Maybe fewer are using it publicly because of the potential reputational risk,” she said.
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