Computer science and fashion? Now, there’s two industries you’d never think of in the same sentence! And when Madé Lapuerta joined Google as an intern in the summer of 2019, she’d never even considered that the two could be combined.
Fast forward to today and Madé is the proud founder of Dashion, an online fashion magazine where she shares data analysis of runway collections to some 280,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
Lapuerta is just the latest in a stream of pioneers who have set out to revolutionize the fashion industry through tech. Zalando, a leading platform for fashion and lifestyle just launched their new digital assistant powered by Chat GPT, the team at Stitch Fix is changing the personal shopping game, and Dress X is doing away with physical clothing altogether in favor of a metaverse wardrobe! Few saw it coming, but the latest ‘must have’ item in the fashion world seems to be… data.
Granted, the fashion industry is a little slow on the uptake here. After all, we witnessed the total disruption of the film and music industries quite some time ago with the advent of streaming. Spotify even started gifting user’s data back to them, in one of the most ingenious marketing ploys of all time, the ‘Spotify Wrapped.’
But fashion has been lagging behind. Sure, there’s been the shift to e-commerce which has pushed retailers to invest in their online marketplace, whilst crucifying those behind the curve (see Forever 21). But compared to the complex algorithms of streaming services (a person’s Netflix home page can be very telling) it might as well be 1995.
This is due largely in part to how the industry works. These days, we’re used to seeing a glut of influencers draped across the front rows at fashion week, while their aspiring counterparts snap content from the fringes. But traditionally, fashion week existed as a trade show for buyers to decide what to purchase for the upcoming season.
This has created a bit of a gap between what consumers actually want and what buyers decide that they want. It’s been a sort of top-down model whereby consumers have been told what they should be wearing by creative directors and the select group of buyers who have access to their collections. That’s been slowly changing over the past fifteen years though, with companies like Moda Operandi placing customers firmly back in the driver’s seat. Data can bridge these gaps in interesting ways, and with the recent success of projects like Dashion it’s clear that consumers are captivated by this intersection between the two.
Data, But Make It Fashion:
Madé Lapuerta was an undergraduate at Harvard’s School of Engineering when she watched a documentary on Alexander McQueen. That was it, she was hooked.
During her time at Google she became acquainted with image recognition models and it got her brain whirring. If she could train AI models to detect products in pictures… could she do this for runway shows? Turns out, she could! It also transpired that a lot of other people were very interested in her findings.
What started off as a small blog on Instagram has now swelled to hundreds of thousands of followers. People come to her page to find out whether the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic is truly dead or what staples they should invest in for the Carrie Bradshaw look…
Lapuerta uses image recognition models which she built to analyze runway collections, red carpet events and TV shows. These models can identify how many times a specific item appeared (say 90s sunglasses) and Lapuerta can then share this data with her engaged following via cute infographics!
Stitch Fix
Online shopping can be a nightmare. You might start off strong, but it isn’t long before you’ve completely lost yourself in a maze of tabs, overwhelmed by choice, and unable to remember what you were even looking for in the first place!
Enter Stitch Fix. Founded by Katrina Lake and Erin Morrison in 2011, this site became one of the very first personal shopping websites and changed the game. Stitch Fix started off using human stylists to offer a personalized curation of products but they’ve since begun using AI-powered technology to learn your style. Stitch Fix began collecting user’s data from the get-go which means they’re now sitting on almost 5 billion consumer data points! Using LLMs from OpenAI as well as their own deep learning models, they’ve been able to translate this data into sales.
What gives Stitch Fix a real edge is that they’ve trained their genAI models using real stylists. This means their Outfit Creation Model can generate millions of new outfit combinations per day, and each and every one is stylist approved!
Zalando’s AI Assistant
Many companies are jumping on the Stitch Fix bandwagon and attempting to personalize their retail offerings. Zalando, a leading online fashion and lifestyle platform announced the launch of their AI powered assistant in 2023 and have since brought out a beta version in certain regions. With this new fashion assistant, customers are able to search for products using prompts.
Just say you’re looking for a graduation dress to wear to a UK University graduation. This new assistant will be able to infer the formality of the occasion and take the weather in the UK into account in order to provide smart recommendations to improve your search. Zalando have said that down the line, they hope the assistant can develop its capabilities to remember the preferences of specific customers and learn their style over time. Cool, huh?
Dress X
While the online retail space is seeing a total overhaul thanks to these smart personal shopping services, Dress X have their sights set somewhere else entirely: The Metaverse. With their slogan, ‘Don’t Shop Less, Shop Digital Fashion’, Dress X are targeting the conscientious yet fashion forward consumer who wants to minimize their carbon footprint without compromising on style. They’ve developed a whole range of digital clothing that consumers can ‘try on’ using the Dress X app before purchasing.
Once purchased, the digital clothes can easily be added to photos and videos so that customers can rock their new style all over the digital realm from live streams to video calls and on their Instagram feeds. It might sound crazy but social capital has become so intrinsically tied to the online sphere that it could be argued it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing day old sweats in real-life once you look great on your socials.
The Future of Fashion: Powered by Data
In a world where fashion intersects with technology, this fusion of data and style has propelled the industry to new places. With data-driven insights empowering consumers and guiding industry decisions, the future of fashion is unmistakably marked by innovation, personalization and sustainability, heralding a new era where trends are decoded and shopping is revolutionized by the power of data.
by Leah McDonald
