You’ll Never Believe Who Collaborated with Falguni & Shane Peacock On Their Newest Collection

Design from Falguni & Shane Peacock in collaboration with IBM using Watson technology.

The third creative mind behind Falguni & Shane Peacock’s newest collection is one we’d least expect—mostly because it’s not the mind of a person, but of an artificial intelligence! This A.I.—IBM Watson—is trained to analyze multiple sources of data from a given time period, and in turn, churn out a report of the most predominant colors, silhouettes, styles, prints, and textures present.

When IBM approached the design duo to create a collection with the help of this artificial intelligence, their vision was clear—to devise the “Future of Bollywood Fashion.” Using Watson, Falguni & Shane Peacock were able to study the rich history of Bollywood fashion to help them predict the direction in which the industry is moving.

To begin, Watson analyzed 600,000 runway images from the last ten years of London, Paris, Milan, and New York Fashion Week combined, to give the designers an overall understanding of global fashion trends. To interpret styles solely from Bollywood, IBM Watson also studied 5,000 images of Bollywood celebrities from different social media sites, as well as fashion imagery from 3,000 movie posters.

Much like how Facebook recognizes human faces, Watson uses “Visual Recognition” to isolate humans from an image and identify the clothes they are wearing – more specifically, prints, colours, and styles.

For example, when Falguni & Shane wanted to create a colour palette reminiscent of 80s Bollywood fashion, they put Watson to work, analyzing films from the 1980s like Mr.India, Qayamat Se QayamatTak, and Maine PyarKiya. Watson’s findings determined that styles from the 80s were commonly worn in shades of licorice, brown yellow, black olive, dark vanilla and camouflage green.

What makes this technology so advantageous is that it conducts thorough research (that would typically take someone months to complete) and presents its findings in a matter of minutes.

Shane Peacock made an interesting observation, “Fashion is usually considered a right-brain activity. So it was very interesting to approach it from a left-brain perspective of logic and data. The data presented by IBM Watson helped us look at the insights as a springboard for our thoughts and helped us think in newer directions!”

With the time and manpower this program saves, it’s not far-fetched to think that fashion designers will consult Watson’s data analysis skills when designing their collections. After all, fashion has proven to be cyclical—constantly referencing styles defined by an era like 70s bell-bottoms, 80s off-shoulder tops, and even those 90s Doc Martens we were convinced would never make a comeback.

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