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In India, when it comes to fashion, Bollywood has undeniably been a major influence. For decades now, the Hindi film industry has inspired and continues to inspire pop culture, haute couture and everything in between. So, when India’s leading fashion designers Falguni and Shane Peacock were conceiving the theme for their next big collection, they zeroed in on the ‘Future of Bollywood Fashion’.
Though the designer duo was looking at Bollywood fashion through a futuristic lens, they wanted to do this by delving into past trends. Now given Bollywood’s rich and colourful history that spans decades, this was not at all an easy task. It was almost like time travel. But Falguni and Shane Peacock found a rather unlikely ally to aid them in their mission – IBM Watson. A technology powered by Artificial Intelligence collaborated with a discipline as human, creative and instinctive as fashion designing and the stunning results were showcased at IBM India Cloud Forum held on Friday. Showstopper actor Pooja Hegde walked down the ramp in a gown that was designed with help from IBM Watson. That’s not all, the track to which she walked to on the ramp – Not Easy – also was a result of a collaboration between IBM Watson and British music producer Alex da Kid.
While speaking at the event about how this unique collaboration came about, Sriram Raghavan, Director, India Research Labs, IBM, said, “Watson APIs analysed over 6,00,000 images from high-end couture, which is from 2006-2017, runway images from the top 4 fashion weeks – Milan, London, Paris and New York….The APIs went through and did their magic to understand these images in a very deep way. But since they were looking at Bollywood, we also sent in tens of thousands of images from the 70s to the present generation of movie images, posters.” For the uninitiated, an API or application program interface is code that allows two software programs to communicate with each other. Watson APIs are capable of sifting through large amounts of data and coming up with meaningful insights.
IBM Watson had been fully programmed to decode fashion images and the key aspects associated with them. It was intelligent enough to detect the face in the image, the pose of the model as well as body, colour, cut and silhouette of an outfit. It could also tell if two outfits were similar and also determine the dominant colours in an image. It then processed this unimaginably huge amount of raw data to come up with useful insights, which were then shared with the designer duo.
Unbelievable as it may seem, Watson had managed to condense years and years of Bollywood fashion into carefully analysed and accurate information. From popular colours through Bollywood’s timeline to prints and silhouettes that dominated a particular season, Falguni and Shane Peacock now had everything they needed to kickstart their ideation process.
“It (Watson) just got us all the data in mere seconds, which was really interesting, astonishing. This kind of research, I don’t think is humanly possible, which is what Watson is able to do. This would have taken us 3-4 months to do and not even be as accurate as what Watson is,” said Falguni.
Ten years ago, you may have probably scoffed at the idea of fashion designers resorting to artificial intelligence to launch their next big collection or maybe simply dismissed it as a distant possibility. But here we are today, designing the future of Bollywood fashion by deriving from its illustrious past ably supported by IBM Watson.
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