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 Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods


Watch Party: The Best TAG in Years, a '60s Sensation, and Omega Goes All White

WIRED

Watch Party: The Best TAG in Years, a '60s Sensation, and Omega Goes All White It's LVMH Watch Week, so here's WIRED's pick of the timepieces that made their debut--plus one notable gatecrasher. The watch world is readying itself for the slew of new releases from the likes of Patek Philippe and Rolex when Watches and Wonders descends on Geneva in April. But this week, the watchmaker Omega and the luxury conglomerate LVMH both spotted a window of opportunity to get pieces out ahead of the annual gathering. Since 2020, LVMH has been kicking off each new year by serving up watches from its stable of brands, including Zenith, TAG Heuer, Hublot, and Louis Vuitton. Meanwhile, Omega--muscling in on LVMH's party somewhat--is leaning into its connection to next month's Winter Olympics in Italy, where it will once again serve as the event's official timekeeper.

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Man with metal detector stumbles on perplexing Viking Age grave

Popular Science

The team found the deceased with scallop shelves partly covering the mouth. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's been a good year for metal detectorists. And now there's yet another discovery to add to the list. Archaeologists in Norway have excavated a Viking Age grave of an individual bedecked in costume and jewelry, as reported by, an outlet that publishes research news from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Scandinavian research group SINTEF.

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  • Retail (0.50)
  • Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods (0.36)

Fashion house Valentino criticised over 'disturbing' AI handbag ads

BBC News

Italian luxury fashion house Valentino is facing criticism after posting disturbing adverts made using artificial intelligence (AI) for one of its luxury handbags online. The brand announced a collaboration with digital artists as part of what it dubbed a digital creative project promoting its new DeVain handbag. But an AI-generated advert it posted on Instagram has been met with intense criticism from fans, who called the visuals - and use of AI - sloppy and sad. The BBC has approached Valentino for comment. The Instagram post promoting the handbag, which has a label to say it was made using AI, shows a surreal collage of models spliced between Valentino logos and its DeVain bag.


Swatch MoonSwatch Mission To Earthphase Moonshine Gold Cold Moon: Price, Specs, Availability

WIRED

Swatch will laser unique gold snowflakes on every new Cold Moon MoonSwatch, but there's a catch--you'll only be able to buy one when it's snowing in Switzerland. First a confession: I own more MoonSwatches than I care to admit. Never let it be said that WIRED does not walk the walk when it comes to recommending products--Swatch has assiduously extracted a considerable amount of cash from me, all in $285 increments. This was no doubt the Swiss company's dastardly plan all along, to lure us in, then, oh so gently, get watch fans hooked. It's worked, too--Swatch has, so far, netted hundreds of millions of dollars from MoonSwatch sales.

  Industry: Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods (1.00)

Swatch's New OpenAI-Powered Tool Lets You Design Your Own Watch

WIRED

The new AI-DADA tool lets you create a unique Swatch design using AI prompts. You can't make a custom MoonSwatch yet--but it's not entirely off the table. Cast your mind back to 2017. In those heady days before ChatGPT and DALL-E, and Zoom calls, Swatch launched a fancy online platform that let you, the watch-buying public, design your own Swatch watch . It was called Swatch x You, and it let you tweak Swatch's standard New Gent 41-mm model by selecting one of the (surprisingly limited) preset designs, which you could then move, zoom, and rotate to fit over the watch and strap.


FITS: Towards an AI-Driven Fashion Information Tool for Sustainability

Theodorakopoulos, Daphne, Eberling, Elisabeth, Bodenheimer, Miriam, Loos, Sabine, Stahl, Frederic

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Access to credible sustainability information in the fashion industry remains limited and challenging to interpret, despite growing public and regulatory demands for transparency. General-purpose language models often lack domain-specific knowledge and tend to "hallucinate", which is particularly harmful for fields where factual correctness is crucial. This work explores how Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be applied to classify sustainability data for fashion brands, thereby addressing the scarcity of credible and accessible information in this domain. We present a prototype Fashion Information Tool for Sustainability (FITS), a transformer-based system that extracts and classifies sustainability information from credible, unstructured text sources: NGO reports and scientific publications. Several BERT-based language models, including models pretrained on scientific and climate-specific data, are fine-tuned on our curated corpus using a domain-specific classification schema, with hyperparameters optimized via Bayesian optimization. FITS allows users to search for relevant data, analyze their own data, and explore the information via an interactive interface. We evaluated FITS in two focus groups of potential users concerning usability, visual design, content clarity, possible use cases, and desired features. Our results highlight the value of domain-adapted NLP in promoting informed decision-making and emphasize the broader potential of AI applications in addressing climate-related challenges. Finally, this work provides a valuable dataset, the SustainableTextileCorpus, along with a methodology for future updates. Code available at [github(.)com/daphne12345/FITS](https://github.com/daphne12345/FITS).

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  Genre: Research Report > New Finding (0.88)
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At TIME100 Impact Dinner, Leaders Discuss AI and the Future of Fashion

TIME - Tech

Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. On Wednesday, leaders in business, art, fashion, and technology gathered on the 102nd floor of New York's One World Trade Center for a TIME100 Impact Dinner. The event orbited around a panel, moderated by TIME's editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, that discussed how AI could shape the future of fashion--particularly from a customer's perspective. The panelists were David Lauren, chief branding and innovation officer for Ralph Lauren, which sponsored the event; Shelley Bransten, corporate vice president, worldwide industry solutions, at Microsoft, which also sponsored the event; and artist and researcher Sougwen Chung, who founded Scilicet, a studio exploring human and non-human collaboration.

  Country: North America > United States > New York (0.25)
  Industry: Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods (0.95)

This Watch Brand Has Made a Completely New Kind of Strap Using Lasers

WIRED

It looks like fabric, feels like metal, and is as light as rubber. Any watch fan looking to tick all of the above boxes would normally expect to be a dab hand with a spring bar removal tool to experience all the above individually, but a new strap developed by Malaysian independent brand Ming appears to now offer the best of all worlds. The one strap to rule them all has been dubbed the Polymesh, and is 3D-printed from grade five titanium, and comprises 1,693 interconnected pieces (including the buckle) held together without any pins or screws. The only additional parts requiring assembly are the quick-release spring bars at each end that attach it to the watch--the articulated pin buckle is also formed in the same process. Ming says that the strap, which is made up from rows of 15 equilateral triangles, meshed together and bookended by larger end pieces, "has more motion engineered into the radial axis than the lateral one," leading to a supple end result that drapes like fabric yet retains the strength of titanium.

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Using LLMs to Directly Guess Conditional Expectations Can Improve Efficiency in Causal Estimation

Engh, Chris, Aronow, P. M.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a simple yet effective use of LLM-powered AI tools to improve causal estimation. In double machine learning, the accuracy of causal estimates of the effect of a treatment on an outcome in the presence of a high-dimensional confounder depends on the performance of estimators of conditional expectation functions. We show that predictions made by generative models trained on historical data can be used to improve the performance of these estimators relative to approaches that solely rely on adjusting for embeddings extracted from these models. We argue that the historical knowledge and reasoning capacities associated with these generative models can help overcome curse-of-dimensionality problems in causal inference problems. We consider a case study using a small dataset of online jewelry auctions, and demonstrate that inclusion of LLM-generated guesses as predictors can improve efficiency in estimation.


Paris Fashion Week's Most Important Model Wasn't Human

TIME - Tech

Noetix's N2 robot walks the catwalk at the UNESCO venue in Paris on Oct. 8, 2025. Noetix's N2 robot walks the catwalk at the UNESCO venue in Paris on Oct. 8, 2025. Paris Fashion Week is no stranger to a gimmick. There was Coperni spraying a dress onto a model in 2022, followed by Schiaparelli's faux animal heads a year later, and then Robert Wun's blood-splattered " horror couture " last year. This week's event in the City of Light hewed to form as Chinese humanoid robot N2, created by Beijing-based Noetix Robotics, strutted awkwardly down a catwalk attired in waistcoat and pearls in the first outing of its kind outside of China.

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