New York City, USA – Last week, the fashion world descended on New York City for New York Fashion Week (NYFW). The bi-annual event celebrated the best in the industry and showcased the hottest trends for the season. NYFW is a massive money maker for the city and the fashion industry at large. On average, the event brings in a staggering 600m annually. But regardless of the stark economic and cultural value the event brings, it is overshadowed by the same existential threat hitting sectors like media and tech – artificial intelligence eroding existing jobs and limiting work opportunities in the future.

AI-generated models are coming to Levi's e-commerce sites. The goal is to sustainably increase the number and diversity of models for its products, it said. Founded in 2019, Lalaland utilizes AI to enable fashion brands and retailers to use hyper-realistic models of every body type, age, size, and skin tone. With these body-inclusive avatars, the company aims to create a more "inclusive, personal, and sustainable shopping experience" for fashion brands, retailers, and customers. "We see fashion and technology as both an art and a science, and we're thrilled to be partnering with LaLaLand, a company with such high-quality technology that can help us continue on our journey for a more diverse and inclusive customer experience," said Dr. Amy Gershkoff Bolles, LS&Co.

In December 2015, the revered French fashion house Louis Vuitton made a surprise announcement about the advertising campaign for its forthcoming spring-summer collection. The new range of clothes and accessories would be modelled on screen and in the pages of glossy magazines not by a famous actor or popstar but by a video game character: the pink-haired warrior Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand's creative director told the press he considered Lightning to be the "perfect avatar for a global heroic woman". The fictional character even carried out interviews to promote the partnership. It was not the first time a fashion brand had collaborated with a major video game. Previously, H&M, Moschino and Diesel had made digital clothes for The Sims.

Chat GPT models show huge potential – even for fashion brands. Chat GPT models are set to revolutionize the fashion industry by providing personalized fashion recommendations. Using data about fashion trends, styles, and individual preferences, chatbots can generate tailored recommendations for users based on their personal style, favorite brands, and what they're looking for in a garment or accessory. This level of personalization is set to provide more relevant and helpful guidance, ultimately improving the shopping experience for consumers. Get ready for a future where your favorite fashion brand has a chatbot that knows your style better than you do.

Tailoring is fancy, sufficiently fancy that you may go your entire life and never once experience the art. It's expensive, having garments custom-made to suit your body shape, even if there are a legion of benefits in doing so. Mass-produced clothes, meanwhile, are never going to do the job if you've got a body that diverges from what's expected or treated as "normal." There are two real problems: Measurement, and manufacturing, issues that the fashion industry is wrestling with right now. A Taiwanese company, TG3D, has at least discovered a way to solve the first part of the equation with little more than an iPhone.

The fashion industry is establishing its presence on a number of visual-centric social media like Instagram. This creates an interesting clash as fashion brands that have traditionally practiced highly creative and editorialized image marketing now have to engage with people on the platform that epitomizes impromptu, realtime conversation. What kinds of fashion images do brands and individuals share and what are the types of visual features that attract likes and comments? In this research, we take both quantitative and qualitative approaches to answer these questions. We analyze visual features of fashion posts first via manual tagging and then via training on convolutional neural networks. The classified images were examined across four types of fashion brands: mega couture, small couture, designers, and high street. We find that while product-only images make up the majority of fashion conversation in terms of volume, body snaps and face images that portray fashion items more naturally tend to receive a larger number of likes and comments by the audience. Our findings bring insights into building an automated tool for classifying or generating influential fashion information. We make our novel dataset of 24,752 labeled images on fashion conversations, containing visual and textual cues, available for the research community.

Market research firm IDC released a report in August 2020 forecasting that the global AI market, composed of software, hardware, and services, is expected to total $156.5 billion in 2020, a 12.3% increase from 2019. Although the COVID-19 pandemic slightly slowed the usual growth, the firm believes that the AI market will recover quickly and projected its value to double in just four years, reaching over $300 billion by 2024. While the speed of AI adoption has varied across different industries, retail is one segment that has been slower to incorporate AI capabilities for a variety of reasons, including concerns over data privacy, job loss, and a lack of readiness. But with the recent ecommerce boom (largely driven by the pandemic), more retailers and "etailers" are finally taking a chance and exploring tech capabilities to create a more enjoyable, efficient, and tailored online shopping experience. Some brands, like ASOS, Burberry, and Victoria's Secret, have successfully deployed AI-driven chatbots to improve the customer support experience for their online shoppers.

Lucy Hale at The CW's Summer 2019 TCA Party, sponsored by BEN (Photo by Jean Baptiste ... [ ] Lacroix/WireImage) Product placement just ain't what it used to be--and boy, is that a good thing. What originated as an old-school Hollywood function to beat housewives over the head with brand names and'must-have' products, has transformed into a modern, data-driven marketing tool that works for everyone involved. For years, BEN, a Bill Gates-owned product placement agency, has been at the forefront. As one of the first companies to utilize AI to identify, match and facilitate product placement opportunities across film, TV, music videos and social media, you will not only see their work everywhere, but not see it everywhere. Historically, they're behind some of the most iconic placements in Austin Powers, Forrest Gump, and ET, but more recent placements range from the adorably obvious (the family eating Cheerios in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) to the unexpectedly inconspicuous (see: flipped Chevrolets in Deadpool or Microsoft phones in Get Out).

This Friday, Artificial Intelligence fashion startup Bigthinx, in partnership with Fashinnovation, will live stream the first fully digital 3D Virtual Fashion Show (including digitised human models) since the coronavirus pandemic forced the fashion industry online. The'virtual' aspect is that the models and clothes are being created using 3D digital design, rendering, and animation, based on technical data (including garment measurements) and photographs of the models and clothes. This will be the first time many fashion professionals have seen virtual fashion since the industry-wide discussions about implementing it ramped up, following the coronavirus-induced lockdown. The realization that digital fashion will be a critical long-term solution rather than a temporary measure is evident in industry announcements from Helsinki Fashion Week, the first to declare they will show 3D virtual fashion shows for the upcoming season and beyond, before Covid-19 forced Milan, New York and others to follow suit. In creating this 3D virtual show, with opportunity comes numerous challenges, especially for a technology company known for its'body scan' avatar solution based on just two photos and a selfie from a smartphone.

Over the last decade, technology has changed the way businesses operate and consumers buy. The field of fashion has been plugged into this changing scenario from the very start. Physical retail stores are now being replaced by e-commerce websites. Online and offline retailers today are using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand their customers tastes and preferences better. Using data science, fashion stylists and designers are able to identify trends and match the expectations of their end consumers. Simply put, data science is technology's ability to aggregate a large set of data, analyse it, and accordingly produce insights that determine future business decisions.