With over 3 trillion dollars’ worth, the global fashion industry contributes to a healthy 2% global GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Be it through the sewing machine or the e-commerce market; the fashion industry has always been the pathfinder of innovative technologies.
Today, Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing every aspect of the fashion industry. The use of AI in the fashion industry in 2021 has become so entrenched that 44% of the fashion retailers (who have not adopted AI) face insolvency. Resulting, global spending on AI technologies by the fashion industry is expected to reach $7.3 billion each year by 2022.
Lisa Carr, the Head of E-Commerce Trading at Agent Provocateur, stated:
“AI is imperative to a business’s success. Without AI, enterprises are missing sales opportunities and efficiencies within their teams. It is an integral part of any business, not just e-commerce or digital.”
Today, AI is often expressed as a black box. You feed it data. It gets you to results. It is true in certain use cases where AI is being implemented, but not all the time. The reality is far from that! Success is still a long way to go. Nevertheless, we are on the cutting edge of AI’s development and its real-world applications.
Macy’s, Alibaba, and Tommy Hilfiger are becoming the leading players of the AI revolution, even more, distant than the future.
Impressions of AI in the Fashion Industry
AI will execute the Fashion Industry more intelligently with expressions of style, uniqueness, and less individualism.
Here are few drifts.
1. AI as a Clothing Designer
Since the design and pattern matching are the key points to design a designer dress for an attractive look, AI is making this mix and match more effortless than ever. In addition, AI can detect new trends in demand globally and propose new ideas by reducing forecasting errors.
As we know, trends in the fashion industry change quickly. It never takes time to shift the market blended with new designs and patterns. To touch the sky, designers need to keep pacing with the latest fashion trends and help them play a significant role. AI algorithms analyze designs through images to copy popular types and produce new ones.
Even after producing the new ideas, it ensures whether the concept will be sold in the market using the data set used to train the AI algorithms. If technology finds some bankruptcy, it will introduce entirely new designs to build and launch in the market to drive the most traffic towards the designer’s business.
2. Styling the Accessories
In the fashion industry, AI doesn’t work on clothes only. Instead, AI in fashion allows us to find those elusive perfect gears that suit our body type (i.e., body shape) and fashion preferences.
AI-enabled clothes and gears are tailored for different occasions, climates, and the user’s style, body type, colors, and the latest style trends.
One example of an AI-powered personal stylist is iLUK. The application is a styling-based technology that uses computer vision and 3D construction of the appearance at its heart and provides possible outcomes. Today, it is being placed in many retail outlets as a pod. The outlets use the AI-powered smart mirror, simplifying the shoppers’ shopping experience with virtual visualization of dresses or accessories and looking on you even without wearing the clothes on your body.
3. Product Visualization
Product visualization is what we want today while shopping online. As a result, retailers are incorporating AI-based visual search technology to understand the content and context of these images to return a list of related results.
Where you can use your camera to capture an object and search the same online, AI-enabled computer vision-based visual search innovation allows retailers to propose thematically or stylistically narrated items to customers in a way they would struggle to do using a text query alone.
4. Manufacturing Process
Using AI tools and technologies, fashion brands can now identify fast-changing fashion trends and supply the latest fashion accessories to retail racks faster than the conventional fashion trade.
As a result, leading fashion brands are quicker in providing instant gratification to direct shoppers by recognizing seasonal demands and manufacturing the suitable supply of the latest apparel.
5. Virtual Merchandising
AI-enabled technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are now closing the online and in-store shopping experience gap.
For example, in-store AR in an outlet allows shoppers to access any wearable through digital mechanisms. Using VR technology, fashion brands have created a virtual image of their pop-up retail store to provide shoppers with a more friendly experience.
The Future of AI in the Fashion Industry
Without a doubt, the fashion ideas currently executed with AI will grow in complexity, pace, and precision.
AI will be embedded in our everyday design making decisions, enhancing our designer’s accomplishment in fashion. But, unfortunately, this will create an ever-increasing divide between sales that have found a way to utilize AI and those that were too overdue.
AI-powered companies utilizing these advanced technologies will produce new attire faster than their competitors and have a higher probability of matching the market’s demands with their collections, becoming more valuable and competitive than the market competition.
