On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will present her latest collection at New York Fashion Week – with a twist, of course. Barton partnered with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM Watsonx on IBM Cloud) to help visitors identify pieces of the collection and try them on virtually.
TechCrunch caught up with Barton and Ganesh Harinath, founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, ahead of the show to learn more about the launch.
For one thing, Barton said technology is being looked at in the way he thinks. He likes to play with the real and the unreal, and he got the idea of using set design like AI, “a portal to the collective world, rather than ‘AI for AI’s sake,'” he said.
“Today, tech is a tool to expand the world around clothes, how they are presented, and how people enter the story, and how we create that moment when your eyes do double take,” he told TechCrunch, adding that the purpose of this collection was to create a sense of curiosity.
Harinath said his company uses IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage to help pull off Barton’s presentation. It was production-grade functionality with a Visual AI lens (built on IBM watsonx) that found pieces of Barton’s new collection. It can answer questions in any language by voice and text and offer photorealistic virtual reality try-ons.
“The hardest part wasn’t tuning the models; it was the singing,” he told TechCrunch. It’s not the first time Barton has put a technological spin on his fashion – last season, he experimented with AI models, again in collaboration with Fiduicia AI.
During fashion week, there was some discussion about which brands – and, if so, which ones – will use technology and artificial intelligence. Barton thinks many brands are using AI, albeit quietly, mostly in practice. “Perhaps few people use it in public because of the potential risk to reputation,” he said.
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It’s a bit reminiscent of the early days when many big fashion names were nervous about starting websites. “Then it became inevitable, and eventually the question went from ‘should we be online’ to ‘does our online presence help?'” he said.
Harinath added that, while many brands are experimenting with AI, many of its deployments remain at a high level – such as chatbots, content generation, and in-house productivity tools.
But Barton sees a world of better prototyping, better visualization, smarter production decisions, and more focused ways to experience fashion, without replacing the people who “make it worth wearing.” Change will come more clearly, he said, “through clear speech, clear licenses, clear credit, and a shared understanding that human intelligence is not an outrageously high cost.”
“If technology is used to turn people off, I’m not going anywhere,” he said, adding that viewers are smarter than we think. “They can tell the difference between innovation and avoidance.”
Despite the tension, AI is becoming the norm, and the day will come when shows like Barton’s are part of the norm. Harinath thinks AI in fashion will be mainstream by 2028, and by 2023, he sees it embedded in the core of retail operations.
“Most of this technology already exists – the difference now is to bring together the right partners and build teams that can work responsibly,” he said.
Dee Waddell, Global Head of Consumer, Travel & Transportation Industries at IBM Consulting, agreed. “When motivation, product intelligence, and engagement are connected in real time, AI goes from being a feature to being a growth engine that drives measurable competitive advantage,” Waddell told TechCrunch.
But until then, there’s this show.
“The most exciting future of fashion is not automatic fashion,” Barton said. “It’s fashion that uses new tools to amplify the craft, deepen the storytelling, and bring more people into the experience, without fooling the people doing it.”
