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

Source: TechCrunch

Kate Barton’s NYFW Presentation Powered by IBM and Fiducia AI

On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will unveil her latest collection at New York Fashion Week with a multilingual AI agent built on IBM watsonx and IBM Cloud. The agent helps guests identify pieces from the collection and try them on virtually.

TechCrunch spoke with Barton and Ganesh Harinath, founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, to learn more about the presentation.

Technology as a Design Tool

Barton says technology is baked into her creative process. She enjoys “playing with the real and the unreal,” and sees AI as a portal into the collection’s world, not just AI for its own sake.

“Today, tech is a tool for expanding the world around the clothes, how they are presented, and how people enter the story… to create that moment when your eyes do a double‑take.”

Harinath explained that Fiducia AI used IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage to deliver a production‑grade activation:

• A Visual AI lens (built with watsonx) that detects pieces from Barton’s new collection.
• Multilingual voice and text Q&A in any language.
• Photorealistic virtual‑reality try‑ons.

“The hardest work wasn’t model tuning; it was orchestration,” he told TechCrunch.

Past Experiments with AI

This isn’t Barton’s first AI‑enhanced runway. Last season she experimented with AI models, also in collaboration with Fiducia AI.

AI Adoption in Fashion

Barton observes that many brands are using AI quietly, mainly in operations, due to potential reputational risk. She likens the current shift to the early days of fashion websites:

“Then it became inevitable, and eventually the question shifted from ‘should we be online’ to ‘is our online presence any good?’”

Harinath adds that most brand experiments remain surface‑level—chatbots, content generation, internal productivity tools—while deeper applications are still emerging.

Vision for the Future

Barton envisions AI enabling:

• Better prototyping and visualization.
• Smarter production decisions.
• More immersive fashion experiences—without replacing the humans who “actually make it worth wearing.”

She stresses the need for clear discourse, licensing, credit, and recognition of human creativity.

“If the technology is used to erase people, I am not into it.”

Harinath predicts AI will become normalized in fashion by 2028, and embedded in retail operations by 2030.

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

Dee Waddell, Global Head of Consumer, Travel and Transportation Industries at IBM Consulting, agrees:

“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.”

Closing Thought

“The most exciting future for fashion is not automated fashion. 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.” – Kate Barton

Image Credit: Kate Barton