I am all for the cyberspace-inspired '90s moment we're having in fashion. CR FASHION BOOK's 1999 covers. Dressing like THE MATRIX. Here for it. It runs along with the current vogue for '90s web design, posts from the GEOCITIES archive, and the like. I find the popular imagination of technology in any era to be fascinating. Fears of automation were expressed widely in WWD going back to the mid-twentieth century. VR was looked at as the next frontier in computing in the '90s. We have similar sentiments about the development of AI and machine learning. Parsing what is reasonable and what is outsized exuberance based on people's investments in the space are two separate things. Sure, widespread investment in an area can be self-fulfilling (that's what investors hope). It can also make people overly optimistic about what technology can reasonably achieve in the near future. There are some exciting things brewing, for sure. I'm all for pushing forward with R&D. But I'm not convinced we're getting bot KARL LAGERFELD in the next few years. Or bot petites mains. According to the MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW, AMAZON is working on AI specifically for apparel and fashion, for tracking trends and giving product recommendations. The article mentions an algorithm developed at LAB126 that can create crude designs based on image recognition. Would love more detail on this. Specific to fashion, I've found that many of these projects have to jump over the (large) assumption that fashionable taste runs according to a rational set of rules that can be replicated in data. If AI is developed to the point of meaningful creativity, fashion design will be just one of many issues to deal with. Time to go read GHOST IN THE SHELL again... Never thought I'd see a single ZARA dress so many times. There's a genre of "every sighting of" a certain garment—I've seen a few on INSTAGRAM. This one is on TUMBLR, and it's a feed of every sighting of this blue off-the-shoulder dress from ZARA since 2016. Now if there's visual AI behind this I'll be really impressed... MAC x AALIYAH is coming in 2018... MICKEY DREXLER joins OUTDOOR VOICES as chairman... COCO is so pro!