On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will debut her latest collection at New York Fashion Week – with a twist, in fact. Barton teamed up with Trust the AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM Watsonx on IBM Cloud) that helps guests discover pieces of the gathering and check out them on virtually.
TechCrunch caught up with Barton and Ganesh Harinath, founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, ahead of the show to learn more in regards to the presentation.
For one thing, Barton said the technology is ingrained of their way of considering. She enjoys twiddling with the actual and the unreal and located the concept of using an AI-like set “a portal into the world of the gathering, fairly than 'AI for AI's sake,'” she said.
“Today, technology is a tool to expand the world around clothing, the way it's presented and the way people get into the story and the way we create that moment where your eyes do a double-take,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the goal of this collection was to encourage a way of curiosity.
Harinath said his company used IBM Watsonx, IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Object Storage to place together Barton's presentation. It was a production-grade activation with a visible AI lens (built with IBM watsonx) that recognizes pieces from Barton's latest collection. It can answer questions in any language via voice and text and offers photorealistic virtual reality try-ons.
“The hardest work wasn’t the model tuning, however the orchestration,” he told TechCrunch. This isn't the primary time Barton has added a technological twist to her fashion – last season, she said experimented with AI modelsalso in collaboration with Fiduicia AI.
There was talk at Fashion Week about whether brands – and if that’s the case, which of them – would use technology and artificial intelligence. Barton believes many brands are using AI, albeit quietly, primarily in operational areas. “Perhaps there are fewer people using it publicly due to the potential reputational risk,” she said.
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It's a bit paying homage to the early days when many big fashion brands were nervous about launching web sites. “Then it became inevitable and eventually the query shifted from 'Should we be online' to 'Is our online presence even good?'” she said.
Harinath added that while many brands are experimenting with AI, much of their use stays on the surface level – resembling chatbots, content generation and internal productivity tools.
But Barton sees a world with higher prototyping, higher visualization, smarter production decisions and more immersive ways to experience fashion without replacing the individuals who “actually make it wearable.” Change will only include more clarity, she said, with “clear discourse, clear licensing, clear credit, and a shared understanding that human creativity is just not a burdensome overhead.”
“If technology is getting used to erase people, I’m not blissful about it,” she said, adding that audiences are smarter than we expect. “You can tell the difference between invention and avoidance.”
Despite the joy, AI is becoming increasingly more sophisticated and there’ll come a day when shows like Barton's are simply the norm. Harinath expects AI to be normalized in fashion by 2028 and integrated into the operational core of retail by 2030.
“The majority of this technology already exists – the critical factor now could be bringing together the fitting partners and constructing teams that may use it responsibly,” he said.
Dee Waddell, global head of consumer, travel and transportation industries at IBM Consulting, agreed. “When inspiration, product intelligence and engagement are connected in real-time, AI evolves from a feature to a growth engine that creates measurable competitive advantage,” Waddell told TechCrunch.
But until then there’s this show.
“The most enjoyable future for fashion is just not automated fashion,” Barton said. “It’s fashion using latest tools to enhance the craft, deepen the storytelling, and convey more people into the experience without flattening the people making it.”
