AI technology is making waves in the media and our daily lives, and the fashion industry is no exception to this. It has been adopted for many reasons, lots to make our lives easier, and sell more products. I am going to look into some examples of this in this post.
If you shop on the Asos app, you might be familiar with the ‘style based on your preferences' section. You fill out a questionnaire and are then presented with a selection of clothes to swipe left or right on, and the app then generates a selection of clothes from this. They also have the same thing for
· styles based on your shopping habits
· similar vibes to your saved items
· key picks from categories you’ve been looking at
· alternatives for sold-out stuff in your saved items
· we found these for you in the sale
All of these are clearly sales tactics, but they do draw you in and sometimes it works well enough to find you a bargain. It can also be useful as there are hundreds of thousands of items on websites like Asos so having something that narrows it down for you is quite helpful to save you from endless scrolling.
The most common example I could think of was sizing assistance. Most websites now offer an enhanced sizing assistant, that not only compares your measurements to those of the brands' sizing but also asks what sizes you would normally wear in other brands and whether they fit well to gauge the correct size for you. This is brilliant, and I think choosing the correct size was one of the biggest barriers to online shopping. Previously I would generally buy the item in two sizes, and send back whichever didn’t fit, which in retrospect is pretty horrendous environmentally, this helps to remove the need for that and it is also great if you are ordering something last minute and really need it to fit. Some companies are taking this concept and basing a whole business around it. ‘TRUEFIT’ is a company that brands can pay to use on their websites that provides effective sizing help and reduces size-related returns. It boasts some big names such as Lululemon and Carhartt.
Then there’s virtual ‘trying on’ which allows the customer to see what the product would look like on them. This is something that I have used on the Ray-Ban website, and it worked well. I remember it being a thing years ago, but it was not very effective, the glasses wouldn’t be in proportion to your face and it looked very unrealistic, it didn’t help you pick a pair of glasses at all. However on the Ray-Ban website, it is so effective you could believe it was a real photo, and it made the online shopping experience much easier and much more effective.
This is one of the ways that technology is aiding the fashion industry and is helping to reduce waste and CO2 emissions. I’m looking forward to finding out about more of the positive impacts technology is having on the fashion industry.
More on fashion and AI: https://techpacker.com/blog/design/top-9-fashion-technology-trends/#:~:text=in%20fashion%20today.-,Artificial%20intelligence,experience%20and%20customized%20product%20suggestions
TRUFIT website: https://www.truefit.com/business
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