Revolutionizing the runway
IBM Watson brought cognitive flair to Melbourne Spring Fashion Week
At a recent Melbourne fashion event, models displayed an intricate exception to the creative rule — a data driven, artificial intelligence swagger, up and down the runway. Before our current cognitive era, fashion reached innumerous lengths of frazzled cashmere. Today, fashion designers are gifted with data-driven insight as a tool to assist with creative freedom and consumer engagement.
Melbourne Couture designer, Jason Grech partnered with IBM to turn fashion on its head. His premise was to merge design with IBM cognitive technologies and understand the latest trends of today and next season while taking on an entirely new creative direction — a data-driven, insight approach to design and decision making.
IBM cognitive technologies comprehend structured and unstructured data, and can reason, learn and interact with humans. Through Grech’s partnership with IBM, he and his team were able to utilize Watson API’s, including Watson Visual Recognition, and cognitive tools from IBM Research to provide insights into fashion trends, consumers and design possibilities during the creative process. As cognitive tools improve in their ability to make sense of data in new ways, for instance by understanding emotion and personality, they are becoming increasingly useful to creative professionals.
Ten years of runway fashion, social data and computed trends in color were analyzed, further enlightening Grech to progressive design, color treatments, fabric textures and palettes of pastels. As Grech points out, his use of pastels as a color palette for the Spring collection was a first for he and his creative team.
The beautiful discovery at the end of the cognitive rainbow is time efficiency. Hence, fashion designers have accelerated launch times for their collections where as in the past, full production begins nearly a full year before launching. Understanding key customer trends in the past and present is key for molding future success.
“My confidence in Watson’s data and design ideas gave me the freedom to focus on the creative side without second-guessing my decisions.”
Jason Grech, Australian fashion designer
With a combination of IBM analytics and cognitive technologies, designers get ahead from copious troves of data in a blink of an eye. Watson provided the patterns and Grech’s team stitched them together for the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week. Learn more about Jason Grech and The Cognitive Collection.
