The fashion industry is undergoing a new revolution and this time Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of its transformation.
Chat GPT, Midjouney, Runway and recently OpenAI’s Sora show the impressive generative capabilities of AI to create pictures and videos using only text prompts.
In a recent study, 73% of fashion executives said that generative AI will be a priority for their businesses in 2024, but just 28% have tried using it in creative processes for design and product development, says eToro analyst for Romania, Bogdan Maioreanu. But we are still in the infancy of AI and it will continue to evolve.
The incredible capacity of AI to design pictures is already proving to be an innovative direction in the fashion industry. And we already had the first AI Fashion Week in April last year, in New York. It was an initiative of the online retailer Revolve and Maison Meta, an AI-centric creative agency and the first three winners have their collections featured in the store. Two of the winning collections came from designers with no fashion background. The winners designed their collections using AI image generators Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and in some cases editing in Photoshop.
To test how easy it is to create fashion designs with AI, I asked Chat GPT and Midjourney, with a few simple prompts to create a small fashion collection for the Summer of ‘24 and the below pictures are the result of the first iteration. It took about five minutes to refine the requests and generate the images, for a person with zero design experience.
While AI looks to start the democratization of the fashion industry, the big houses are also making steps to integrate AI into their creation and production cycles. Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, the most valuable European fashion company, has announced its collaboration with Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (Stanford HAI) to explore the applications of AI technology in its business. The company said that it has been utilizing artificial intelligence in various parts of its value chain for several years, but considers recent generative AI breakthroughs to show new opportunities for major innovation and efficiency, but also challenges and risks. Other fashion brands like Collina Strada and Heliot Emil have fed images of their previous looks into a generative AI tool to produce new designs that could be refined with text prompts to craft their Spring/Summer 2024 collections. Also, the Spanish brand Desigual launched an on-demand collection that was designed using AI tools.
While the visible part of AI is covering the image generation, there is also a less visible part that can help the fashion industry tackle all sorts of challenges. It can help standardize garment manufacturing, identify pattern or color differences, defects and also optimize the materials buying cycles helping make the production more efficient. It also can help, by analyzing social media and e-commerce results to forecast fashion trends, helping companies minimize the losses from unsuccessful collections.
In order to be put to work the AI needs data centers and processing power. Right now NVIDIA is estimated to supply 98% of the GPUs for data centers, its business increasing 400% since last year. The company shares jumped 6.4% in extended-hours trading last night after the semiconductor giant reported quarterly results that hugely beat markets’ expectations on earnings and revenue. NVIDIA stock price increased over 236% in the past 12 months, its impressive stock market performance making the American company very popular with individual investors. NVIDIA is the 9th most held stock by Romanian investors on the eToro social trading and investing platform.
