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.

The fashion industry did $3 trillion in business, 2% of global GDP in 2018; e-commerce fashion amounted to $520 billion in 2019. AI is poised to revolutionize the fashion industry by providing insights into fashion trends, purchase patterns, and enabling better inventory management. Capgemini, the French consulting services multinational, estimated that global annual spending on AI by retailers is projected to hit $7.3 billion by 2020, and AI could help retailers save a potential $340 billion annually by optimizing processes and operations, according to a recent account in T_HQ technology and business. The global brand H&M has been applying AI solutions to boost business operations. One example is a system to organize and allocate masses of unsold stock to retail stories with highest demand, reducing the need for discounted sales.

Silicon Valley is abuzz with Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) and blockchain vendors seeking the Holy Grail of Retail: mass consumer markets where their technology can help fashion designers and retailers survive the "retail apocalypse." At the recent San Francisco Tech Fashion Week, retail experts provided invaluable insights that could save millions of designers, major retailers and small shops from bankruptcy. Here are key insights from three panels. In 2014, Macy's learned that "omnichannel marketing is the way to go." Instead of targeting customers with one channel, whether online or in-store, retailers must pursue multiple channels. For example, small retailers can also sell on Amazon to leverage its free shipping, which is a major competitive advantage.

The "AI in Fashion Market by Component (Solutions and Services), Application (Product Recommendation, Product Search & Discovery, and CRM), Deployment Mode, Category, (Apparel, Accessories, and Beauty & Cosmetics), End User, and Region - Global Forecast to 2024" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The Global AI in Fashion Market is Expected to Grow from USD 228 Million in 2019 to USD 1,260 Million by 2024, at a CAGR of 40.8%. Customer's demand for a personalized experience to drive the adoption of AI in fashion across end-users Major growth factors for the market include increasing need for inventory management, customer's demand for a personalized experience, and the growing influence of social media in the fashion industry. However, integration with the legacy system would limit market growth. Fashion designer end-user segment to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period Based on end-user, AI in the fashion market is divided into fashion designers and fashion stores.

Starting up in her 50s, Swati Padmaraj is bringing style gurus to one's home and increase a retailer's engagement with customers with machine learning platform'Style-At-Iz' by Atiz Fashion House. After 25 years of being a housewife and a mother, anyone would want to retire after the kids are off to college. But, Swati Padmaraj actually went back to college in 2011 to study a degree in designing and sourcing apparel at Seattle University to fulfil her childhood dream of being a fashion designer. Funnily enough, the master's degree in chemistry she got 33 years ago played a vital role in her becoming a fashion designer. "I realised how to use different materials and create my own brand," says Swati, founder of Atiz Fashion House, which owns startup Style-At-Iz.

Artificial Intelligence, which often is associated with complicated computing for high-end machines, is now coming of age to empower creative industries, such as fashion and design. Zarine Bajaj, a 36-year-old entrepreneur from Delhi, is using cutting-edge technology such as Artificial Intelligence to build solutions for fashion designers. The objective is to assist indie fashion designers to manage the complicated business side of their work. Zarine's startup Findow provides interactive and intelligent boutique solutions purposefully built to address the requirements of fashion designers, luxury and retail brands. The technology side of the platform aims to simplify critical elements such as purchasing, monetisation, customer management, store analytics, contextual selling capability of brands and to help them leverage technology in their daily work and not get put off with the intricacies and bulkiness of existing systems and thus resort to inefficient manual techniques.

In the lead up to Pausefest, we sat down with AI expert Dr. John R. Smith from IBM to find out if robots can ever become truly creative. Why is artificial intelligence an important avenue to explore within the realms of technology? Researchers have actually been exploring AI and machine learning technologies for decades, even though it's really only been the past few years that it's gained traction outside of the lab. AI represents a new kind of computing - one that can learn through experience, much like humans do, and interact with humans in a more natural way than was previously possible. At IBM we believe that it will transform the world in dramatic ways - from things simple as how we interact with our devices and computers to access information (think voice recognition), to more profound ways like healthcare, cancer and climate change.

Lingga Madu dreams that one day his company will design and sell fashionable clothes at a price everyone can afford. Born of past experience, it is a business vision very much focused on embracing the future. Having grown up in Jogja – where the average daily wage of US$3 means it ranks as one of Indonesia's poorest cities – the 32-year-old software engineer recalled how the latest fashions were beyond the reach of most people. That memory stayed with him and in 2014 Madu founded Sale Stock, a Jakarta-based e-commerce company where the guiding principle is to make more by charging less. A moneymaking marriage between fashion design and artificial intelligence (AI) allowing the latest AI technology to mine and analyse market data and customer behaviour to a level beyond human capability, thereby identifying designs that will sell and tailoring production accordingly.

The effort points to ways in which Amazon and other companies could try to improve the tracking of trends in other areas of retail--making recommendations based on products popping up in social-media posts, for instance. For instance, one group of Amazon researchers based in Israel developed machine learning that, by analyzing just a few labels attached to images, can deduce whether a particular look can be considered stylish. An Amazon team at Lab126, a research center based in San Francisco, has developed an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from images, and can then generate new items in similar styles from scratch--essentially, a simple AI fashion designer. The event included mostly academic researchers who are exploring ways for machines to understand fashion trends.

The effort points to ways in which Amazon and other companies could try to improve the tracking of trends in other areas of retail--making recommendations based on products popping up in social-media posts, for instance. For instance, one group of Amazon researchers based in Israel developed machine learning that, by analyzing just a few labels attached to images, can deduce whether a particular look can be considered stylish. An Amazon team at Lab126, a research center based in San Francisco, has developed an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from images, and can then generate new items in similar styles from scratch--essentially, a simple AI fashion designer. The event included mostly academic researchers who are exploring ways for machines to understand fashion trends.