In a recent interview, Daniel Zhang, CEO of China-based fashion retail giant, Alibaba, said, “Companies must use Big Data analytics to redefine the traditional core elements of retailing – Consumers, Merchandise and Stores – and the relationships amongst those elements to upgrade current formats and create new retail occasions.” 

The company has invested $15bn in its R&D labs in a push to become the AI leader. It has also launched Fashion AI stores with intelligent mirrors, garment tags, and Bluetooth chips embedded within every product. Other brands like H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, and Amazon have also adopted AI technologies and are raising the bar on service and personalization.

Thus, after revolutionizing a range of sectors, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has also sneaked in into the fashion industry. It is playing a crucial role in transforming the industry by bringing the best possibilities into every dimension of the field.

AI in Fashion Designing

Trends in the fashion industry change every day, with new designs and patterns flooding the market now and then. And designers struggle to keep pace with ever-changing styles. AI can ease this task by detecting new trends and analyzing the designs via images and popular styles. 

After analyzing, AI uses the data to see what sells better in the market and recommends designers to build and launch their own clothing brands. Retailers like Amazon and Walmart are already making use of this application.

 AI in Fashion Manufacturing and Supply

AI can easily take up the mundane tasks of sewing and sorting dresses with better accuracy, faster speed, and reduced labor costs. AI-enabled robots can not only sew fabrics with perfection but also detect the faults in fabric quality and design shades. 

In inventory and supply chain, AI can speed up delivery by improving routes for vehicles derailed by unforeseen circumstances and by cutting down the logistic supply and shipping costs.

AI in Fashion Retail

In retail, AI and ML are providing automated solutions to monitor customer activities and visualize their preferences to know what range of products they prefer and what they avoid. It can also track footfalls in retail stores and gather user feedback. 

Visual perception-based AI models also help the shop owners in maintaining and managing their inventories by categorizing the items in the store. 

AI in Fashion Styling

For styling, computer vision and 3D reconstruction technologies are employed to create 3D avatars of the customers. The data is fed into the software to analyze a user’s body shape with an identical body shape, mass, size, and color. It then creates a virtual trial while using your face. 

Van Heusen has created such a virtual trial mirror that enables users to see how an outfit would look on them by projecting virtual garments onto their reflection. All they need to do is scan the outfit’s barcode and stand in front of the mirror. 

 AI in Online Fashion and E-commerce

In online shopping and e-commerce, AI analyzes the filtering behavior of consumers to assess what kind of products they are looking for. It screens the users’ search history data and recommends similar items, in line with their budget, preferences, and other attributes. 

It also makes use of the data fed into users’ search history to recommend other suitable items they would probably check on their next visit. It also helps the purchasing departments to better understand the volume needed and minimize overstock.

AI in Visual Search

AI-enables visual search technology allows users to capture the image of an object and search the same online. The visual search model is fed with huge amounts of data sets with annotated images. This makes the clothing items being searched recognizable to machines and allows the retailers to suggest systematically or thematically related items to users. 

AI and ML algorithm-fed machines can also recognize separate objects within a single image and offer shop-the-look opportunities to the shoppers. For retailers, it creates opportunities to personalize the shopping experience and enable cross-selling.

The use of AI in the industry has become so well-entrenched that about 44% of fashion retailers who haven’t adopted AI are facing bankruptcy today. Thus it’s clear that the time of being average is gone – to survive and to become one of the top-performing companies, a business needs to leverage AI.

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay