HFW x ImaGenie collaboration Powered by Stylumia
Stylumia’s focus is on using technology to solve for global sustainability, the democratization of creative power, and getting ready for tomorrow, today. ImaGenie generated a new set of designs using inputs from styles showcased at the Helsinki Fashion Week, the first and most sustainable fashion week recognized today. In 2020 Helsinki Fashion Week also became the first fully 3D digital fashion week, with digital sustainability and technology at its core structure. The partnership is more than just an exercise in pushing the boundaries of creativity but a coming together of two future-focused mindsets.
There was a time when the sources of inspiration for those in the creative fields like fashion design were finite and tangible, sales channels were limited, and customer touchpoints were personal and linear. With social media, e-commerce, social commerce, and the advances in material and production technology, the world of fashion design, marketing, and sales have exploded, blurring most boundaries. Modern fashion retail has an accuracy problem as the number of designs being churned out increases to keep pace with a world that moves away from classic and well-defined fashion seasons to real-time, fickle and some-friendly fashion choices.
How does ImaGenie work?
ImaGenie is to fashion design what the digital-camera and image-filters were to photography. The most innovative game-changing developments in an industry only saw incremental improvements for decades.
For this, we’ll illustrate how we worked with images of styles from HFW.
Step 1: We trained the ImaGenie® Engine with more than 150,000 images from multiple luxury retailers (similar to how a Generative Adversarial Network framework is trained). This deconvolutional neural network generated new unconditioned images, uninfluenced by numeric and aesthetic factors but based on similarities of attributes and evaluation by a convolutional neural network.
Step 2: Stylumia’s proprietary Demand Sense® Engine ranked these 150,000 styles for sales performance and customer acceptance using numerical success parameters like aging, sales velocity, markdowns, replenishments, correlation to consumer demand trends, customer reviews and ratings and many more signals. The ImaGenie® engine refined the generated designs using this secondary conditional input.
Step 3: Images of the sustainable designers from HFW were introduced as a primary conditional design input. Significant consumer demand influencing aesthetic attributes like silhouettes, colors, prints, patterns, etc., were introduced to this stage’s data set. The ImaGenie® engine factored the attributes, matching them with style performance ranking on the one hand and predicted demand on the other.
Step 4: ImaGenie® generated final images based on these multiple conditional inputs.
“We will see the field of fashion change radically in the coming years; tech tools like the ImaGenie will further shape the industry into a technologically savvy and interdisciplinary landscape. We chose to use ImaGenie in the above-described way for HFW designers to analyze the designs to include into our report’s results. We look into how our designers and our platform can further push to promote and scale sustainable fashion to make it a norm in the industry. I believe ImaGenie has multiple application ways and a lot of potential, which I find very exciting. I am looking forward to the further R&D of the software and democratization of the technology to the masses.” – Evelyn Mora, Founder, Helsinki Fashion Week
How can a fashion designer use it?
ImaGenie® has a gamified dashboard, allowing designers and even consumers to control inputs and set conditions for the GAN network to factor before generating output images. It will enable designers to develop design shortlists curated to a particular brand/ designer DNA using these inputs. A fashion designer’s ability to create trend-relevant storyboards and mood-boards, determine which design concepts to pursue, and be stimulated by ImaGenie’s creations – will change the way we look at design in the future.
“Early experiments with ImaGenie have given us a glimpse into the future of design. A future where designers can optimize their creation and have higher chances of success, each and every time. A future where brands could invite their customers to co-create with the inhouse design team, thus truly democratizing the power of a tech-product. A future where there is less time, economic and ecological wastage because brands only prototype and produce products in winning designs, powered by Demand Science™. We are discovering what the power of ImaGenie could be, with each day spent on developing the product.”- Ganesh Subramanian – Founder, Stylumia
Find out more by dropping a line to say hello, at hello.imagenie@stylumia.com