Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a revolutionising force in almost every industry in the world in recent years. The fashion industry is no exception. As an industry so prone to change, and with the willingness to accept quick trends and updates, the fashion industry is becoming a leader of the pro-AI movement.
But will this adoption of AI prove to be for the better or for the worse? The fashion industry has a unique ability to affect social change through conditioning of the beauty standard, and some worry that with AI, all the hard work done for the body positivity movement will be lost.
AI Tools are Changing the Industry
The fashion industry is a highly competitive world and getting started in this industry can take an awful lot of work. For instance, before becoming a model, you have to drop several thousand dollars on professional headshots.
Nowadays, AI tools like Portrait Pal and PixelPose can help to reduce these costs by using generative AI to create novel professional headshots of you from your own photos. This can help to get new models into the fashion industry with less of a barrier to entry.
It seems like every week new AI tools and models are released, with no sign of slowing down. As with all advancements in tech, AI’s impact on the fashion industry comes with benefits and concerns.
The Benefits of AI for the Fashion Industry
1. Reducing Waste
One major point of contention in the fashion industry is how much waste is generated. A huge amount of fabric waste is produced every year from fast fashion, where quickly changing trends and inaccurate guesses of stock needs cause large amounts of leftover fabric to be discarded into landfills.
AI tools could be extremely beneficial in helping to reduce this waste and could help to lessen or even eliminate this extremely negative effect of the fashion industry. There are a variety of ways in which AI tools can help to achieve this, e.g. through more precise manufacturing processes.
2. Supply Chain Management
A big issue for retailers is the inability to know how much stock to buy and when. If they have too much stock, customers can have a hard time choosing what they want and are less likely to engage with the business overall.
However, not having enough stock is also a huge problem. If you have an item that sells particularly well, then having the item sell out means that when customers come looking for it, you’re directly losing out on sales.
For small businesses in particular, supply chain management can mean the difference between life and death. So it’s an extremely important part of the life cycle of a fashion retailer, and they often choose to overstock rather than understock.
This causes there to be an excess of stock at the end of the run, which means a lot of fabric waste going to landfill, as well as a lot of lost profit in costs. AI models have the ability to be trained on historical datasets for retailers, which can help them learn about the sales performance of different types of inventory.
These AI tools can provide an accurate idea about how much stock is needed and when that stock should be ordered. This helps the business to make an informed decision about which items they’ll be ordering as well as giving more insight into the overall sales information of their business.
3. Design
Another issue for the fashion industry is having designs that don’t sell. These designs can often be very similar to what was selling well in a different year or in a different season, but for a seemingly inexplicable reason just aren’t flying off the shelves like they did before.
Having an AI tool to analyse and compare an abundance of data like customer preferences for the season and predicting upcoming trends can help to make sure that the designs for each and every piece are suited to the market when they are released. This helps businesses ensure they sell their stock and don’t end up sending large amounts of unsold fabric to waste.
4. Customised Marketing
From using AI to create engaging stories, to using AI to create and optimise personalised ads, there are countless potential use cases for marketing fashion brands with AI.
Reaching your target market can make all the difference for a fashion business. But it can be difficult to know exactly how to market your product to your target market, especially if you don’t fall into the target group yourself.
AI tools can be extremely helpful in making sure that you can maximise the impact of your advertising and ensure you’re advertising to the right people.
What are the Concerns?
Like all new technologies, the use of AI created all kinds of new concerns for people to think about. While many of these concerns are universal across all types of AI technology, there are a few that are unique to the fashion market.
The fashion industry is to a large degree responsible for maintaining the general conception of what a beauty standard is. In recent years, there’s been a significant push to move away from unhealthy beauty standards of the past and move towards more natural and accepting beauty standards.
The use of AI tools could potentially threaten that if people aren’t careful to regulate how and why they’re using these AI tools in the first place. Many high-profile fashion businesses have already been subject to controversy over a lack of diverse models representing the brands.
There are even upcoming startups like Deep Agency that provide 100% AI modelling services. This aims to completely take the human model away from the photoshoot process. The launch of this business was met with widespread criticism, largely due to the potential conflict that this could have with real models who are struggling for work.
Unfortunately, there’s no real legislation in place to regulate exactly how AI is being used in any industry, much less the fashion space. This leaves the most vulnerable contract workers at risk while allowing the benefits of AI to be given to people at the top of the industry.
