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.

The success of large language models has shifted the evaluation paradigms in natural language processing (NLP). The community's interest has drifted towards comparing NLP models across many tasks, domains, and datasets, often at an extreme scale. This imposes new engineering challenges: efforts in constructing datasets and models have been fragmented, and their formats and interfaces are incompatible. As a result, it often takes extensive (re)implementation efforts to make fair and controlled comparisons at scale. Catwalk aims to address these issues. Catwalk provides a unified interface to a broad range of existing NLP datasets and models, ranging from both canonical supervised training and fine-tuning, to more modern paradigms like in-context learning. Its carefully-designed abstractions allow for easy extensions to many others. Catwalk substantially lowers the barriers to conducting controlled experiments at scale. For example, we finetuned and evaluated over 64 models on over 86 datasets with a single command, without writing any code. Maintained by the AllenNLP team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), Catwalk is an ongoing open-source effort: https://github.com/allenai/catwalk.

It won't be long before the globe's biggest fashionistas are back in town to hit the catwalks of London Fashion Week. With over 5,000 industry press and buyers likely to attend, and hundreds of luxury labels showing their wares, it's a major event not only for industry insiders, but for shoppers and fashion lovers alike. Orders placed during the week alone often exceed £100 million as consumers get inspired to experiment with fresh new looks which emerge during the shows. This offers a massive opportunity for both luxury and fast-fashion retailers when it comes to increasing sales. But making the most of it demands a carefully executed strategy which combines the best of both technological innovation and creative control.

New York Fashion Week is drawing to a close. The US event is the first of February's four big international Fashion Weeks, which are also held in London, Paris and Milan. It usually features a heady mix of supermodels, front rows peppered with celebrities and political controversy. Before the style set descends on London, it's time to look back at what we've learned from the US style capital. Tom Ford showed his serious side, kicking off NYFW with a show that expressed his feelings about President Trump's proposed border wall.

A rolling robot will model couture designs at London Fashion Week for the first time ever. Silicon Valley robotics company Ohmni is partnering with Los Angeles-based designer Honee to send one of its telepresence robots down the runway in September. It's the latest example of how hi-tech devices are being outfitted for everyday use, from wearables to 3D-printed clothing. The robot is slated to walk the catwalk alongside human models on September 15th and 16th at an event presented by House of iKons at the Millennium Gloucester London Hotel. It will be wearing a Honee design, but the exact specifics of the ensemble are being kept under wraps until the event.

This is exactly what Qzone, one of China's largest online social network platforms owned by Tencent, YouTu Lab, an AI research lab under Tencent focusing on machine learning, and Vipshop Holdings Limited, China's leading online discount retailer for brands, have joined hands to accomplish. The three platforms have produced a new AI powered report that reveals the fashion preferences of China's "post-95" generation in terms of most popular colors, fabrics and patterns and inspired a new collection by famous Chinese designer Chi Zhang, named Designer of the year by Esquire China, to be launched at New York Fashion Week 2017. This is the first time that AI technology has been leveraged to identify fashion trends to guide the design of a major new collection for presentation at New York Fashion Week. By applying facial recognition technology to big data aggregated on Tencent's Qzone platform, YouTu Lab's algorithm identified the ages of "post-95" users accurately within three years. In order to analyze fashion preferences, the AI-powered technology was able to distinguish users' clothing from a multitude of varied backgrounds with 95% accuracy.