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

On Saturday, designer Kate Barton will debut her newest collection at New York Fashion Week — with a twist, as you might expect. Barton partnered with Fiducia AI to build a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM Watson X on IBM Cloud) that helps guests identify pieces from the collection and try them on virtually.

For Barton, the collaboration makes sense because technology is already woven into the way she thinks about fashion. She’s drawn to the space between the real and the unreal, and she liked the idea of an AI-forward set concept as “a portal into the collection’s world, rather than ‘AI for AI’s sake,’” she said.

“Today, tech is a tool for expanding the world around the clothes, how they are presented, and how people enter the story, and how we create that moment when your eyes do a double-take,” she said, adding that her aim with this collection was to spark curiosity.

Harinath said his company relied on IBM WatsonX, IBM Cloud, and IBM Cloud Object Storage to bring Barton’s presentation to life. The activation was production-grade, featuring a Visual AI lens (built with IBM WatsonX) that can detect items from Barton’s new collection. It answers questions in any language, via voice or text, and delivers photorealistic virtual try-ons in a VR-style experience.

“The hardest work wasn’t model tuning; it was orchestration,” he told. And this isn’t Barton’s first time pairing fashion with tech — last season, she also experimented with AI models, again alongside Fiducia AI.

Around fashion week, there has been plenty of talk about whether brands — and, if so, which ones — would be using technology and artificial intelligence. Barton believesmanyf brands are already using AI, quietly, mostly behind the scenes in operational workflows. “Maybe fewer are using it publicly because of the potential reputational risk,” she said.

She compared it to the early days, when major fashion houses were hesitant to launch websites. “Then it became inevitable, and eventually the question shifted from ‘should we be online’ to ‘is our online presence any good?’” she said. Harinath added that while many brands are testing AI, much of what’s deployed today remains at a surface level, things like chatbots, content generation, and internal productivity tools.

Barton, however, imagines a future where the tech enables better prototyping, stronger visualization, smarter production decisions, and more immersive ways to experience fashion — without sidelining the humans who “actually make it worth wearing.” Progress, she said, depends on clarity: “clear discourse, clear licensing, clear credit, and a shared understanding that human creativity is not an annoying overhead cost.”

“If the technology is used to erase people, I am not into it,” she said, adding that audiences are more perceptive than they’re often given credit for. “They can tell the difference between invention and avoidance.”

Even with the tension, AI is becoming more routine, and there will likely come a point when presentations like Barton’s feel normal. Harinath expects AI in fashion to be normalized 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,” he said.

Dee Waddell, Global Head of Consumer, Travel and Transportation Industries at IBM Consulting, agreed. “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,” Waddell said.

But until that future arrives, there is this show.

“The most exciting future for fashion is not automated fashion,” Barton said. “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.”