Pencils shavings. Crumpled drawing sheets on the floor that didn’t make it to the trash can. Fabric scraps and leftover sewing threads. A typical designer’s studio?
Quantity forecasts and estimates. Large production runs. Unsold inventory. Defective pieces headed to seconds stores or flea markets. A typical production unit?
Air-conditioners. The sound of hangers being shifted. Lines outside fitting rooms. Struggling to find the perfect fit. A typical clothing store?
Let’s say, “Not anymore” to these questions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing what shopping and fashion now mean. And with good purpose – sustainability!
Fashion designer and owner of the sustainable brand House of Gulaal, Gunriddh Sial from Lucknow, says that she regularly follows developments in AI about fashion. For her brand, Sial creates models, backdrops, and designs using AI-based software. She spends only a little money on the software and saves tons on locations, photography, makeup, model fee, and so on.
McKinsey & Company estimates that generative AI can add anywhere between $150 billion to #275 billion to the operating profits of the fashion industry. We are all still trying to wrap our heads around the immense possibilities of AI and where we are headed. But we know this much – it is bringing about massive changes in how we consume fashion. How? Read on.
AI Can Forecast Trends
AI helps designers quickly predict future trends, colours, and styles, taking the guesswork out of the process and reducing the chances of designers creating outdated collections or patterns that the customer may reject. And with social media and influencers, the common public has also become a trendsetter.
Until not long ago, forecasters and buyers attended fashion shows in Paris, Milan, London, and New York to observe the styles on the runway, and then drafted trend reports. Leading retailers would then refer to these reports and interpret them to come up with their next collections. It was a time-consuming process as well as tightly controlled by a few design houses. But with the growth of social media, fashion has democratised and the trends are no longer being dictated by a few high priests and priestesses of fashion!
Source: Heuritech.com
AI takes it a step forward. With its ability to analyse vast amounts of data, consumer preferences, shopping behaviour, social media posts, and other factors that influence fashion, it can predict trends faster and with greater accuracy than before. And, as the American footwear brand Wolverine discovered, to great success!
Wolverine partnered with Heuritech, the France-based company that uses AI to predict trends, to launch a new product called “Windsurfer Blue” Saltwater Duck Boot in 2020, and witnessed an unheard of 100% percent sell-through in just 10 days with an over 70% growth in new consumers shopping with the brand.
AI Can Also Predict Sales
Stockpiles of unsold inventory are a huge contributor to the waste generated by the fashion industry. It was recently reported that the ever-growing giant piles of discarded clothing, most of it non-biodegradable, in the Atacama Desert in Chile can now be seen from space.
AI models, fed with past inventory and current sales performance, churn out data to predict future sales. Fast fashion brands tend to produce in bulk, not knowing how much of it will sell.
Source: Skyfi.com
With the help of machine learning and advanced analytics, brands can get reasonable estimates of future sales potential, customer behaviour, and trends.
With the help of machine learning and advanced analytics, brands can get reasonable estimates of future sales potential, customer behaviour, and trends.
This helps businesses to know what items to stock and when they should be stocked. Sales prediction leads to reduced wastage, fewer garments headed to landfills and incinerators, and better profits.
Growing The Fashion Circle
Circular fashion aims to extend the lifespan of clothes and keep them in circulation by recycling, reusing, and upcycling to prevent fashion items from adding to currently overflowing landfills. AI is enabling speed, scale, and efficiencies in the second-hand sale market, estimated to be worth $24 billion, and accelerating its adoption.
thredUP, one of the world’s largest online resale platforms, is at the forefront of this movement. Through AI, it can do visual tagging of second-hand clothing like describing necklines, size, colour, label name, wear, and tear, etc. This helps the brand put a suitable resale value on items. thredUP’s reports claim that the resale market for fashion can beat fast fashion within a span of just 10 years!
Rent Out The Fancy
We have learned to shun single-use plastic but we don’t talk enough of single-use fashion! All of us can agree that we have that one (or two) untouched box of clothes gathering dust in a corner of our cupboards. Expensive clothes from your wedding or your cousin’s seldom get to come out and breathe. And after a while, they simply get discarded. This is where fashion rentals instead of buying fashion is not only a much more practical option but also the more sustainable one. Add AI to the mix, and it just gets easier and extends the lifecycle of the clothing further!
Rent the Runway, an e-commerce platform, lets you rent clothes on a monthly membership basis. You select a plan, choose your clothes, add the delivery date, and receive your outfits. Once you’ve worn them and taken pretty pictures for the gram, return the clothes. Rent the Runway incorporates AI in its processes and uses robotic arms to speed up the sorting and cleaning of returned items, and reduce the time taken in processing the products. In India, Rent it Bae has a similar concept of renting clothes online so that you can look like a million bucks on every occasion without spending millions.
Digital Models And Samples
Sometimes, to perfect one piece, 20 samples have to be created. Put AI’s digital models wearing digital samples into the mix and you take strides towards a less wasteful process. This also helps to reduce expenses, materials, and water usage that go into creating samples. In a 2019 survey by McKinsey & Company, almost 83% of participants thought that virtual sampling of clothes would replace physical sampling by the year 2025. And this shift has gathered pace since COVID-19.
A Dutch fashion startup called Lalaland creates fashion models, or avatars, for e-commerce brands to showcase their products without having to do a real photoshoot and hire real models! Brands can
customize the model’s hair, skin tone, body shape, and everything else to match their potential clientele in just five minutes. This process is 90% faster than a real photoshoot!
By digitizing the sampling process, companies do away with the need for physical samples along with the waste associated with the hit-and-trial process and also make fashion more inclusive and diverse.
Source: Lalaland.ai
Digital Wardrobes For Digital Clothes
Can you imagine a world of digital clothes? Well, a brand called Fabricant has already imagined this and turned it into reality. It is the world’s first digital fashion house offering digital-only clothing! The company, on a mission to “Build a new fashion industry where everyone participates and profits”, invites users to create, trade, and wear digital outfits as NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) which can be worn in the metaverse.
Through the online design studio Fabricant Studio, designers can create virtual clothes to be worn and sold in the metaverse. Such kind of clothing is usually used for avatars in virtual games. So, in real life, you could have a sustainable capsule wardrobe and in the virtual world, you could have a virtual wardrobe with hundreds of designer, futuristic clothes!
Know more here about how the worlds of fashion and technology are collaborating to take forward the sustainability agenda.
Scanned To Perfection
AI can scan the human body and guide brands to create well-fitted clothes and thus cater to more body types. My Size Inc. has designed an app that acts like a ruler and notes down your body measurements through your camera. Your measurements can then be saved to shop clothes online. It is time to retire the phrase ‘one size fits all’!
It is well known that the wrong size is one of the top reasons for returns of online fashion purchases, which adds to the cost and carbon footprint of logistics. If customers receive clothes that fit them like a pair of gloves, return and exchange rates on online clothes would drop by a significant figure.
Source: Mysizeid.com
This brings us to the next great development in AI – virtual fittings.
Virtual Fittings
Equivalent to an in-store trial room, virtual fitting rooms gives customers the power to try on products via their phone camera from anywhere in the world. The technology had been whispered about somewhere around 2005 and has since grown exponentially. Such shopping options help customers to make informed buying decisions and reduce the returns of online shopping. This in turn reduces the carbon footprint of reverse logistics of shipping returned clothes to manufacturers.
Astrafit and TryNDBuy are some of the AI-enabled technology companies that work with fashion brands and retailers to provide them with virtual fitting solutions. Lenskart has been amongst the pioneers of introducing this technology in India. Through AI, Lenskart enables shoppers to try on glasses virtually to see which frame looks the best on their faces before ordering.
Sustainable Supply Chains
Brands that are guided by principles of sustainability can use AI to create environmental-friendly supply chains. Indian entrepreneurs are employing sophisticated technology to ensure sustainable materials and processes are used throughout the chain and track the effects of their products on the environment. Fashinza is one such startup that deploys AI to develop a supply chain that is low waste, efficient and sustainable.
We can also learn from Alibaba’s supply chain management. They introduced the Xuni technology – or the New Manufacturing ecosystem – which uses AI to design an end-to-end supply chain process to achieve a demand-driven production cycle. Moreover, its fabric-cutting machine can calculate how to strategically use almost every inch of a sheet of cloth without creating tons of waste. Reports have shown that by employing such technology, Alibaba has been able to reduce its water consumption by 50%!
AI Hears You
AI can track consumer behaviour and help brands strategically target potential customers as against producing in bulk for customers that perhaps don’t even fit into their target audience. Furthermore, chatbots – or AI stylists, as they’re called – have made it easier to communicate with brands and get answers to questions. These serve as data points to study different types of consumers and even offer recommendations to shoppers. Data is the key here that guides brands in knowing what to produce and how much to produce.
Stitch Fix is a great example of a sustainable fashion brand leveraging data analytics and AI to develop algorithms and processes that offer personalised fashion. On its website, you’ll find a ‘style quiz’ that will show you products from its inventory relevant to your answers. So, you can choose, not from a mass of homogenised fashion, but just what is right for you!
Some Caveats Apply!
However, there are some concerns with deploying these technologies. Firstly, since designs are on the cloud, companies are vulnerable to hacking, and hence, theft of designs. There is no concrete law yet to protect AI-generated fashion. Besides, with the amount of data being captured and processed, there are privacy and data security concerns.
Then there is the argument that human jobs may be lost as brands automate processes and rely less on human intervention. Besides, machines are machines! They lack the quirks, individuality, and passions of the human brain and heart. While machines can create designs, can they create masterpieces that the many genius, brilliant human designers do?
We don’t know it all yet as this is a rapidly evolving technology. But we can take comfort from the fact that most of the time, change is good and that humans have shown a great capacity to embrace change and adapt to it.
All the developments and trends suggest that Artificial Intelligence is poised to be transformational for the fashion industry and will accelerate the shift towards more sustainable, inclusive, and democratised fashion. And those are reasons enough to root for it!
