Designer Kate Barton teams up with IBM and Fiducia AI for a NYFW presentation | TechCrunch

On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will unveil her latest collection at New York Fashion Week — with a twist, of course. Barton teamed up with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM watsonx on IBM Cloud) to help guests identify pieces of the collection and try them on virtually.

TechCrunch caught up with Barton and Ganesh Harinath, the founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, before the show to learn more about the presentation.

For one, Barton said technology is baked into how she thinks. She likes playing with the real and the unreal, and found the idea of using AI-like set design, “a portal into the collection’s world, rather than ‘AI for AI’s sake,” she said.

“Today, tech is a tool for expanding the world around the clothes, how they are presented, and how people enter the story, and how we create that moment when your eyes do a double-take,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the goal for this collection was to create a sense of curiosity.

Harinath said his company used IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage to help pull off Barton’s presentation. It was a production-grade activation with a Visual AI lens (built with IBM watsonx) that detects pieces from Barton’s new collection. It can answer questions in any language via voice and text and offers photorealistic virtual reality try-ons.

“The hardest work wasn’t model tuning; it was orchestration,” he told TechCrunch. This isn’t the first time Barton has put a technological spin on her fashion — last season, she experimented with AI models, also in collaboration with Fiduicia AI.

At fashion week, there was some chatter about whether brands — and, if so, which ones — would be using technology and artificial intelligence. Barton thinks many brands are using AI, though quietly, mainly in operations. “Maybe fewer are using it publicly because of the potential reputational risk,” she said.

It rhymes a bit with the early days when many big fashion names were nervous about starting websites. “Then it became inevitable, and eventually the question shifted from ‘should we be online’ to ‘is our online presence any good?’” she said.

Harinath added that, though many brands are experimenting with AI, much of its deployment remains at the surface level — such as chatbots, content generation, and internal productivity tools.

But Barton sees a world of better prototyping, better visualization, smarter production decisions, and more immersive ways to experience fashion, without replacing the humans who “actually make it worth wearing.” Change will only come with more clarity, she said, with “clear discourse, clear licensing, clear credit, and a shared understanding that human creativity is not an annoying overhead cost.”

“If the technology is used to erase people, I am not into it,” she said, adding that audiences are smarter than we think. “They can tell the difference between invention and avoidance.”

Despite the tension, AI is becoming more routine, and there will come a day when shows like Barton’s are just part of the norm. Harinath thinks AI in fashion will be normalized by 2028, and by 2030, he sees it becoming embedded into the operational core of retail.

“Most of this technology already exists — the differentiator now is assembling the right partners and building teams that can operationalize it responsibly,” he said.

Dee Waddell, Global Head of Consumer, Travel and Transportation Industries at IBM Consulting, agreed. “When inspiration, product intelligence, and engagement are connected in real time, AI moves from being a feature to becoming a growth engine that drives measurable competitive advantage,” Waddell told TechCrunch.

But until then, there is this show.

“The most exciting future for fashion is not automated fashion,” Barton said. “It is fashion that uses new tools to heighten craft, deepen storytelling, and bring more people into the experience, without flattening the people who make it.”