Fashion Education Needs an Overhaul
Educators are equipping a whole generation of designers with skills that won’t add value to the future of the industry.
The ultimate goal of a fashion designer is to create garments that consumers want and buy. They consistently miss the mark however, with more product ending up in landfill than being sold at their intended price. The industry hasn’t evolved from seeing fashion design as a creative discipline, to a more analytical one. The lack of analytical skills in fashion designers may have hurt the bottom line of apparel brands for decades, however, it has also cut out an entire generation of talent from driving the future of the industry.
Go to any fashion school and you’ll find conceptual thinkers who have no idea about data analysis. Creativity is a major component of design, but data is the bigger one if the goal is to sell products. The world is a statistical goldmine; we know exactly what’s selling, where, and who’s buying it. With a bit of know-how, we can draw powerful correlations from this data, and use that to design products that are likely to succeed. We’ve started to see examples of this in the industry, with companies like Stitch Fix, Amazon, and Zalando leveraging retail data to determine product opportunities. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the people driving these innovations are engineers and statisticians, not fashion designers.
Simply adding some statistics units to the curriculum is not going to solve the problem. The reality is AI will always be better at analysing data and drawing actionable design decisions quickly. An AI, for example, can watch and learn from a user’s interactions on an eCommerce site, and design, render, and display products to the consumer in real-time based on what it believes they want. As great as this sounds, the AI still needs to be told what to do, and in the case of making design decisions, it must be done carefully to align with the brand aesthetic and objectives. This is where fashion designers can add the most value.
AI allows brands to use individual customers as the basis of inspiration for designs. This shifts the creative process towards a more symmetric interaction with consumers. Brands must learn to harness AI to pioneer new and meaningful experiences with consumers, and this will vary from brand to brand, market to market. The most qualified professionals to lead this decision-making are fashion designers. They have a vision for the product, and AI is a tool for delivering that vision. Educators need to accept this reality and start equipping designers with the skills they need to thrive in this future.
