Darefest16

At the 2016 Met Gala on May 2nd, IBM and Marchesa unveiled a dress unlike any that haspreceded it; a collaboration with cognitive woven into every step of the creative process–from concept, to R&D, from design and alteration to the finished product. The data-drivendress illustrates the changing relationship between man and machine and shows howcognitive systems can augment human creativity by unlocking new levels of artistic visionthat have remained untapped to date. Today, cognitive systems like Watson are givingartists, designers and creative minds the tools to make sense of the world inground-breaking ways, opening up new avenues for humans to approach creative thinking.

Innovation is as key to fashion as is the buzz created by fashion influencers and fans. Fashion designers have only been able to drawinspiration from about 20% of the world’s data and information. That’s because most of the world’s data and information is unstructuredand hidden from computing systems of the past. News articles, research reports and social media posts are all unstructured data. To createa dress for the Met Gala, Marchesa wanted to uncover design inspiration from this untapped source of information.

Marchesa partnered with IBM Watson, a cognitive computing system that can understand, reason, and learn from the 80% of data andinformation that is unstructured to enhance their creativity and innovative designs. Watson made sense of three kinds of data; about fabric,color, fan voices to support the creation of a dress that would not otherwise have been possible.

The cognitive creation relied on a mix of Watson APIs, cognitive tools from IBM Research, solutions from developer partners like Inno360and the creative vision from the Marchesa design team, spearheaded by Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig.

The IBM x Marchesa collaboration demonstrates how IBM is pushing the boundaries of creativity and discovery. It shows the possibilities ofhow Watson can be applied to discoveries in many industries and in solving society’s biggest challenges. The technologies –from those usedto develop the dress to those embedded into the dress itself –can analyze volumes of data and understand complex natural language, andit’s helping enable creative application and discovery in many areas, such as: marketing, new product R&D and environmental exploration.