Fashion Meets Technology

Karolina Kurkova attended the Met Gala, the uber fabulous fashion event hosted by Vogue, in a dress that was half man/half machine-made.
The “Cognitive Dress” is a product of a partnership between British design studio Marchesa and Watson, IBM’s friendly cognitive computer and I think that it’s absolutely fabulous!

The white tulle gown, embroidered with 150 LED-connected flowers, is a glimpse into how humans and machines can work together to create something that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
To design the dress, Marchesa’s designers first chose five sentiments they wanted the dress to express: joy, patience, excitement, encouragement, and curiosity. Then they fed two datasets into IBM’s Cognitive Color Tool, a program that uses color psychology to match emotion to hues. The datasets—a collection of runway dress images from various designers and a collection of images of Marchesa dresses— refined the colors that Watson could choose from to ensure they aligned with Marchesa’s brand.  The purpose of the color picker wasn’t to dictate what Marchesa should do, but to serve up a range of color palettes that the designers could choose from to light the LED flowers. “Basically it guides the designers,” says Ying Li, a researcher at IBM.
The LED lights attached to the dress’ embroidered flowers are connected to Watson’s Tone Analyzer API, which is able to interpret the emotional content of tweets tagged #MetGala and #CognitiveDress.
As the tone of the tweets change, Watson is able to pull from the color palettes it generated and change the hue of the dress in real time. If tweets have a high “joy” value, for example, the dress would light up with a bright rose color; while tweets with a more “excited” tone will turn the flowers a shade of aqua. Even the fabric, a lightweight tulle, was chosen through a cognitive process.
See it in its full tech glory here and let me know what you think new application. Is it cheating the creative process or enhancing it?

If I were connected to this beautiful creation, I would be a bright shade of aqua!