NEW YORK — On Sunday, influential voices from throughout luxurious trend, know-how and retail convened for an intimate cocktail throughout New York Fashion Week on the iconic Hotel Chelsea. The occasion, ‘Fashion in a New Era of Technology & Innovation’, was co-hosted by The Business of Fashion and Kate Davidson Hudson, founder and chief govt of luxurious procuring and styling app, Dress.
Designers and inventive administrators Prabal Gurung, Paul Andrew of Sergio Rossi, Jennifer Fisher, Timo Weiland, Michelle Ochs of Hervé Léger and Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, alongside trend insiders like Rachel Zoe, Sai De Silva and Jessel Taank engaged with entrepreneurs together with Patricia Bonaldi, Nancy Twine, Sherri McMullen, SpreeAI’s John Imah and Fashion Fair Cosmetics’ Desirée Rogers. Brand executives from the likes of Versace, Google, Snapchat and NN07 had been additionally in attendance. The occasion sparked animated conversations that spanned from the function synthetic intelligence performs in personalisation to the way forward for luxurious retail and its technological evolutions.
Hudson’s Vêtir displays the sort of innovation driving change within the business immediately. The AI-driven platform caters to purchasers by providing a procuring ecosystem by way of personalised AI-generative search and styling, closet digitisation, digital try-on and an individually curated market that includes merchandise from model companions.
The platform addresses the rising shopper curiosity in partaking with next-generation instruments, with 79 % of consumers surveyed by Google in 2024 saying they’d discover AI product suggestions useful to facilitate their procuring expertise, as reported in BoF and McKinsey’s The State of Fashion 2025 report.
“Clients are overwhelmed by beautiful products, but they’re underwhelmed by personal relevance. Vêtir’s AI learns from every touchpoint across the platform. As a user interacts with it, it becomes smarter. It intimately knows you and understands what you like and what you won’t like,” Hudson instructed BoF.
Guests in attendance mentioned the sort of alternatives next-generation platforms and instruments like Vêtir unlock throughout the worth chain, to drive ahead the way forward for the style business — in addition to the constraints it may create, but additionally overcome.
“I’m a big believer in technology as a tool,” content material creator Alejandra Rojas instructed BoF on the occasion. “But you need someone to really curate it. […] Technology can help to shape these virtual showrooms or even just the connection between the final customer and the brand.”
“Creativity will always be creativity, but I think AI and technology [are] about tools that can emphasise what the creativity can do,” added Patricia Bonaldi, web character and designer of PatBO, expressing pleasure for the subsequent evolution of know-how that encapsulated the night’s spirit of collaboration and forward-thinking innovation.
Many designers in attendance had been centered on the chance to enhance their sustainability impression by way of new applied sciences — from returns to sampling to recycling — in addition to chopping pointless overheads.
Hillary Taymour, inventive director at womenswear model Collina Strada, shared her hope for evolving the “fabrication and innovation of tech fabrics, to make sure that we can make better clothes that are better for the planet.”
Rose Colcord, founder and inventive director of lingerie model CouCou Intimates, spoke of the chance tech affords in decreasing waste within the samples course of: “For a much more sustainable way to reduce the amount of samples to create a garment that is to the standard of the designer.”
Meanwhile, rising designer Amir Taghi was centered on how these “kinds of innovations will help further e-commerce and lessen returns” — a serious impression on the underside line, but additionally on a retailer’s carbon footprint from the transportation emissions to the packaging and usually product waste.
Designer Elena Velez can be centered on the chopping again of enterprise overheads by way of next-generation platforms: “A lot of the issues in fashion are obviously correlated to finance, and where [new technology] becomes interesting is where tech can come in and cut down on a lot of the overhead and the ways that we spend time that incur [these costs].”
I’m an enormous believer in know-how as a software. But you want somebody to essentially curate it.
— Alejandra Rojas
A variety of attendees additionally shared with BoF their hope for next-generation know-how’s broadening of world alternatives and conversations.
Abrima Erwiah, founding father of trend life-style model and social enterprise Studio 189, mentioned: “I think the greatest rewards will be where we can take communities that were not included in global conversations and use that technology to help them, whether it’s advancing manufacturing capabilities through material science, [offering] access to markets — and I’m going to use AI just as a way of even tapping into new markets.”
Meanwhile, content material creator Jessel Taank shared a “hope that technology is able to open the doors to bigger and better storytelling”.
Looking to the longer term, company spoke in regards to the mindset evolution of the business and its future workforce in adopting these new applied sciences.
“Naturally, the industry loves to embrace it,” says John Imah, founding father of digital try-on platform SpreeAI. “But I think the challenge is the speed to actually get it a part of their business part of every day. That takes time.”
As Rajni Jacques, international head of trend and magnificence at Snapchat, shared: “The future is going to be driven by the consumer. What does the consumer want? What does the consumer need? And it’s up to tech companies to figure that out.” As she emphasised, it is going to be the subsequent generations — Gen Z, Gen Alpha and Gen Beta — that may “redefine how tech lives in the newer economy”.
Looking forward, Hudson stays assured about luxurious retail’s future, sharing a selected give attention to the developments in agentic AI — the proactive software of generative AI instruments that permits methods to not simply generate outputs, but additionally act as autonomous brokers.
“People do not want to jump around to 15 different sites to find what they need,” added Hudson. “Vêtir’s provides the search and discovery of products you didn’t even know you needed because AI knows and serves it to you first. And we’re going to see this not in five years — it’s at Vêtir now.”
BoF’s ‘Fashion in a New Era of Technology & Innovation’ cocktail was made attainable in partnership with Vêtir. Special because of Hotel Chelsea for internet hosting this gathering.