How AI Is Fueling the Fashion Industry

Fashion is highly popular and profitable, making it a perfect industry for AI innovation and efficiency. AI can help generate concept art, optimize supply chains, improve sustainability, prevent fraud and theft, encourage merchandising equality, and more.

SwissCognitive Guest Blogger: Zachary Amos – “How AI Is Fueling the Fashion Industry”

Artificial intelligence will transform every industry it touches, from medicine to music. Many remain reluctant and question AI’s legitimacy in specific sectors. However, AI could empower fashion to a never-before-seen level of innovation and efficiency.

Fashion is one of the most profitable enterprises in the world, and it has a history of some of the most problematic scandals to match its timeless persistence. How will AI accompany the industry into a new age of success, despite negative associations with both?

1. Creating Concept Art

AI art generators are a hot topic, as controversies surrounding plagiarism and bias run rampant. However, the fashion industry must recognize AI’s potential for eliminating inspiration blocks and inspiring creative ideation. Fashion designers must navigate this new territory lightly to ensure they aren’t stealing ideas from others. If they do this successfully, prompting an AI to create something as simple as a “red dress concept” to something as complex as a “1970s-inspired denim jacket with influence from 2000s style” is only a question away.

A feature like this could predict fashion trends without knowing. Staying on top of trends is one of fashion’s most demanding mental and physical aspects, and AI could alleviate that burden. However, fashion designers must find ways to trust budding AI with their financial future because one misstep could jeopardize a brand’s seasonal resilience.

2. Optimizing Supply Chains

Fashion has a poor reputation regarding ethical working conditions and workforce treatment. These complaints could disappear if AI can assist workers or alleviate human burdens. People could eventually delegate roles to AI that would otherwise put them in a compromising work environment. Workers could then provide mechanical oversight with AI training instead of other questionable obligations for unjust wages.

Additionally, streamlined supply chains equal more prompt deliverables and reduced energy expenditure. As AI constantly collects data, it can inform makers how to implement process changes for efficiency and meet customers’ ever-changing demands.

3. Saving the Planet

Unfortunately, fashion is one of the most damaging industries to the planet unless it changes with the help of AI. Production yields 10% of the world’s carbon emissions, on top of the ecological stressors it encourages. It consumes excessive amounts of water, perpetuates environmental racism, and harms biodiversity with poorly disposed of textiles and microplastics. Excitingly, AI could eliminate or curb nearly every adverse impact of the industry.

For example, designers who use AI may be able to craft a top-selling garment for the next season because it generates ideas based on historical successes and what is trending through social media hashtags. These high-quality and desirable items could lead to increased customer purchases and satisfaction, alongside reduced trash because what is created is actually being sold. The clothing could be produced on a more eco-friendly manufacturing line, crafted with sustainably harvested materials using less energy and resources.

4. Preventing Fraud and Theft

Dupes and artistic theft riddle the fashion world, partly due to its inaccessible, luxury prices for designer brands. However, AI could prevent customers who want genuine designer products from being swindled. AI, like the Dupe Killer, has the perfect data set for recognizing design irregularities and authenticating pieces based on historical data like trademarks and pattern identification. It prevents consumers from spending outrageous money on counterfeit merchandise.

5. Encouraging Merchandising Equality

Countless garments end up in landfills or are returned to stores — e-commerce and brick-and-mortar — because of misconstrued expectations. Many motivations, like poor fit or inaccurate color, could cause customers to ask for their money back. Instead, AI could craft personalized pieces of clothing from a customer’s exact measurements. Tools like this could minimize body-type discrimination in an industry known for favoring petite sizes, which aren’t representative of a diverse population.

Additional tools like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) compound AI’s effectiveness in raising customer satisfaction and readiness to make purchases. People who are assured of accurate measurements and can visualize garments on them before buying will have greater confidence when investing in clothes.

AI Could Change Fashion for the Better

Artificial intelligence could positively influence an industry struggling to overcome its adverse environmental impact and inability to achieve equality. AI could guide fashion into a golden age by crafting accessible, trendy designs at potentially lower prices because of streamlined manufacturing.

About the Author:

Zachary Amos is the Features Editor at ReHack, where he writes about artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and other technology-related topics.