Designer Kate Barton teams up with IBM and Fiducia AI for a presentation at New York Fashion Week

On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will unveil her latest collection at New York Fashion Week — with a special twist, of course. Barton collaborated with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built using IBM Watsonx on IBM Cloud) to help guests learn about and experience parts of the collection virtually.

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

For example, Barton said technology enters her way of thinking. She said she likes to play with the real and the unreal, and found the idea of ​​using an AI-like set design to be “a portal into the world of the set, rather than AI for AI’s sake.”

“Today, technology has become a tool to expand the world around clothing, how we present it, how people get into the story, how we create that moment when your eyes do a double take,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the goal of the collection was to create a sense of curiosity.

Harinath said his company used IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage to help implement Barton’s presentation. It was a production-level activation with a Visual AI lens (built using IBM watsonx) discovering pieces from the new Barton collection. It can answer questions in any language via voice and text and offers realistic VR experiences.

“The hardest work wasn’t fine-tuning the model, it was the coordination,” he told TechCrunch. This isn’t the first time Parton has put a technological twist on her fashions – last season, she experimented with artificial intelligence models, also collaborating with Fiduicia AI.

At Fashion Week, there was some chatter about whether — and if so, which — brands would use technology and artificial intelligence. Barton believes that many brands are using AI, but quietly, mainly in operations. “It may be that fewer people are using it publicly because of the potential reputational risk,” she said.

It’s a bit like the early days when many big fashion names were nervous about creating websites. “Then it became inevitable,” she said, “and eventually the question went from ‘Should we be online’ to ‘Is our online presence useful?’”

Harinath added that while many brands are experimenting with AI, much of its deployment remains at the superficial level — such as chatbots, content creation, and internal productivity tools.

But Barton sees a world of better prototypes, better visualization, smarter production decisions, and more immersive ways to experience fashion, without replacing the humans who “actually make it worth wearing.” Change will only come with greater clarity, she said, through “clear rhetoric, clear licensing, clear credit, and a shared understanding that human creativity is not an inconvenient public cost.”

“If technology is used to erase people, I’m not interested in that,” she said, adding that the public is smarter than we think. “They can distinguish between invention and avoidance.”

Despite the tension, AI is becoming more routine, and there will come a day when shows like Parton’s are just part of the norm. Harinath believes that AI in fashion will be normalized by 2028, and by 2023, he sees it becoming an integral part of the operational heart of retail.

“Most of this technology already exists — the difference now is assembling the right partners and building the teams that can operate it responsibly,” he said.

Dee Waddell, global head of consumer, travel and transportation at IBM Consulting, agreed. “When inspiration, product intelligence, and real-time engagement are connected, AI goes from being an advantage to a growth driver that leads to measurable competitive advantage,” Waddell told TechCrunch.

But until then, there is this offer.

“The most exciting future for fashion is not robotic fashion,” Barton said. “It’s fashion that uses new tools to enhance craftsmanship, deepen storytelling, and bring more people into the experience, without diminishing the people who make it.”