On Saturday, designer Kate Burton will unveil her latest collection at New York Fashion Week — with a twist, of course. Barton worked with Fiducia AI to create a multilingual AI agent (built with IBM Watsonx on IBM Cloud) to help visitors identify collection pieces and try them on virtually.
TechCrunch caught up with Barton and Ganesh Harinath, the founder and CEO of Fiducia AI, ahead of the show to learn more about the presentation.
First, Barton said the technology is based on the way she thinks. She likes to play with the real and the unreal, and came up with the idea of using AI-like set design, “a gateway to the world of collecting, rather than ‘AI for AI’s sake,'” she said.
“Today, technology is a tool to expand the world around clothes, how they’re presented and how people enter the story and how we create that moment where your eyes do a double take,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the goal of this collection was to create a sense of curiosity.
Harinath said his company used IBM watsonx, IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Object Storage to help deliver Barton’s presentation. It was a production-quality activation with a Visual AI lens (built with IBM watsonx) detecting pieces from Barton’s new collection. It can answer questions in any language via voice and text and offers photorealistic virtual reality tests.
“The hardest work wasn’t model tuning, it was orchestration,” he told TechCrunch. This isn’t the first time Barton has taken a technological turn in her fashion — last season, she did experimented with AI modelsalso in collaboration with Fiduicia AI.
At fashion week, there was some chatter about whether — and if so, which — brands would be using technology and artificial intelligence. Barton believes many brands are using AI, albeit quietly, mostly in operations. “Maybe fewer use it publicly because of the potential reputational risk,” he said.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
It fits a bit with the early days, when many big names in fashion were worried about starting websites. “Then it became inevitable and eventually the question shifted from ‘do we have to be online’ to ‘do we have a good online presence?’ he said.
Harinath added that although many brands are experimenting with AI, much of its development remains at the surface level – such as chatbots, content creation and internal productivity tools.
But Barton sees a world of better prototypes, better visualization, smarter production decisions and more immersive ways to experience fashion, without replacing the people who “really make it worth wearing.” Change will only come with more clarity, he said, with “clear discussion, clear licensing, clear credit, and a shared understanding that human creativity is not an annoying overhead.”
“If technology is used to erase people, I don’t like it,” he said, adding that the public is smarter than we think. “They can tell the difference between invention and avoidance.”
Despite the tension, AI is becoming more routine and there will come a day when shows like Barton’s will just be part of the norm. Harinath believes AI in fashion will be normalized by 2028 and by 2023, he sees it being integrated into the retail business core.
“Most of this technology already exists – the differentiator is now getting the right partners together and building teams that can operate 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 goes from a feature to a growth engine that drives measurable competitive advantage,” Waddell told TechCrunch.
But until then there is this show.
“The most exciting future for fashion is not automated fashion,” Barton said. “It’s fashion that uses new tools to enhance craft, deepen storytelling and bring more people into the experience, without flattening the people who make it.”
