A fashion designer working on a new collection has an idea, but wonders if it's been done before. Another is looking for historical inspiration--1950s-style wasp waists or 80s-era padded shoulders. The suite of AI tools IBM is developing for the fashion industry can take a photo of a dress or a shirt and search for similar garments. It can search for images with specific elements--Mandarin collars, for example, or gladiator laces, or fleur-de-lis prints. It can also design patterns itself, based on any image data set a user inputs--architectural images, amoebas, sunsets. "Fashion designers arduously put in efforts and time in coming up with new designs which could potentially be trend-setters," says Priyanka Agrawal, a research scientist at IBM Research India, who has worked on Cognitive Prints.