Well I feel like I’ve been living under a rock. The term “fashion tech” is simple but new in combination to me–in fact I didn’t realize it was so widely used across the fashion and heyyo, tech industries. After finding a local Seattle fashionista girl who’s modeled on my favorite local luxury consignment store (The Refind, duh) and noticing her excellent Tik Tok content, I found that she talks a lot about Fashion Tech. (Check out a local article from UW about Mary here.) Coming from a background of working in tech through content and product design, and starting my career in fashion retail, it sounds like the perfect combination of all my favorite things.
This terminology awareness led to a series of discoveries across the web that has me inspired and excited to link to my findings! I cannot take credit for all of these as I’ve scavenged through several other blog posts, but I think it’s so important to have a centralized place to document these! If anything you’re getting a copy of my personal reference list.
The best post I found that references several sites was from Deadline. This list has different blogs and online magazines that talk about fashion trends and news and I’m already starting to really love a few of them! I’d heard of Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) before but had never spent much time on it. It’s really a great one stop shop for information about fashion tech. Glossy was a new one to me, I love how easy it is to parse through content. But Business of Fashion (BoF) is a new favorite for me. I subscribed to their newsletter and within a day started receiving incredibly interesting information. As I’m working on a fashion AI startup I found their recent article about the growth and importance of AI in fashion super relevant.
Why Fashion Tech is so exciting
What’s so exciting to me about the fashion tech is this marriage between not only my two favorite things, but also the way that tech can help fashion accelerate and meet more of customers’ needs. The way that fashion as an art form (in its many ways) can help improve the way that tech is developed and maintained. There are evergreen conversations surrounding the ethics of technology, and with AI in particular, how fashion presents new use cases for the industry to stress test what should be created, by whom, and how. There are moral quandaries like “Will AI reduce or remove creativity across industries?” “How will intellectual property be protected when used to develop libraries?” and my favorite “Will AI replace humans and remove jobs?”
The use cases of fashion for AI will help us not only answer these questions but also help there be more ease around AI. It’s just the next evolution in tech. There will be another one when the subsequent tech era comes along.
What I’m most excited about is what is beyond AI that will continue to evolve fashion–and that’s people. There’s no stopping people’s love of fashion and it’s always evolving. By bringing more information to people (like me, always learning!) then there’s more room to be inspired. As I learn more I’ll continue to update you all here.
