Women Leading Visual Tech: Radically Transforming Fashion

In early 2020, we started our monthly Women Leading Visual Tech series to showcase women whose work in visual tech is reshaping business and society. Since then Abigail Hunter-Syed, a Former Partner at LDV Capital, spoke with researchers, investors and entrepreneurs. To name a few: Dr. Timnit Gebru, Esther Dyson, Dr. Mackenzie Mathis, Dr. Kate Darling, Carol Reiley, and Chen Zhang. (Note: After five years with LDV Capital, Abby decided to leave LDV to take a corporate role with fewer responsibilities that will allow her to have more time to focus on her young kids during these crazy times.)

In our first discussion group, we were talking about the Future of Materials, Design & Digitization.

Our second WLVT community event was hosted on December 8th and it was all about fashion. You might ask, “why fashion?”

Clothing gives people a snapshot of who we are and how we identify ourselves. Whether it was embroidering little flowers onto our Sunday bonnets back in the day, or going to the mall with our friends, or sharing our new NFTs on social, there's something about clothing that is inherently creative and social.

Over the past decade, we've seen a big transition in what clothing is. eCommerce and fast fashion have started to dominate the scene where it's an isolating experience scrolling through your eCommerce grid on your phone.

Whether you're in Tokyo, or in London, LA, or New York, you see people wearing the same Zara dress or the same The North Face jacket. This accessibility has come at a massive cost to the environment.

How can we make fashion more sustainable, responsible, beautiful, expressive, and inclusive?

Attendees of our second WLVT community event shared their opinions.

Here at LDV Capital, we invest in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data.

We have all heard of computer vision and photos that are helping with customer research, molecular imaging and computational design that are going into material sciences, 3D design and digitization of textile fabrication and demand forecasting, 3D printed “kinematics” & bionic clothing, and the role of robotics in the supply chain and manufacturing.

When you move over to eCommerce, the photos and videos that dominate the grids today will be soon replaced with virtual try-on, immersive and live shopping experiences. Retail will be revolutionized by software leveraging video and computer vision to analyze how people shop, and interact with marketing & advertising materials that leverage Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the verification for resale, repair, and recycling. Visual tech is at the center of all of this and it has the power to transform fashion in a meaningful way.

We’d like to thank our keynote speakers, Caley Taylor of CLO Virtual Fashion, Madeleine Gong of Wearable X, and Neha Singh of Obsess, for sharing their wisdom.

We were honored to have 73 participants and this image shows a subset of our fantastic attendees.

We received an overwhelming interest in this event but had to hand-pick only 50 participants with the idea to discuss the topic in small groups led by our brilliant discussion leaders:

Nour Karessli, Senior Data Scientist at Zalando (we touched on the topic of fashion and eCommerce in our interview with Nour)
Michelle Kim, Co-Founder at Pantastic
Sheena Butler-Young, Senior Correspondent at The Business of Fashion
Sophie Op den Kamp, Managing Director at The Fabricant
Melissa Gonzalez, Founder & CEO at Lionesque Group
Sapna Shah, Founder at Retail X Series
Gloria Liu, Software Engineer at Forma Tech
Dr. Gaile Gordon, Expert in Residence with us at LDV (see our interview “No Perfect Time to Start a Company”)
Daria Shapovalova, Co-Founder & CEO at DressX
Joo-Lee Lim, Managing Director at World Innovation Lab
Catherine Dupere, Partner at Isomer Capital
Heather Marie Udo, Founder & CEO at Shoppable

Here’s a video recording of the first part of the event:

A few thoughts that stuck with us:

One of the questions that we discussed in our second discussion group.

“The 3D revolution has just begun...we envision a world where every single garment has a digital twin.” - Caley at CLO
“With an interactive environment on your website where there is a virtual try-on, you could select the garment that you would like to see, put in your measurements, and then see how that would drape on your avatar.” - Caley at CLO
“As interest in data, personalization, and greater experiences on the body increase, so will the need for enchanted textiles and clothing.” - Madi at WearableX
“The future of wearable tech and smart clothing is data-driven, personalized by the wearer, and gets smarter as you wear it.” - Madi at WearableX
“The future eCommerce will be dynamic experiences. Today, we can do little animations, but we are restricted by the GPU on mobile devices because all of this is being delivered through the browser. Over time, as GPUs become more powerful, the experiences will become more dynamic and more personalized.” - Neha at Obsess
“In the future, there will be new Metaverse platforms that won't start out as games, but that will be actually purpose-built for shopping, fashion, and various other activities.” - Neha at Obsess

Check out our 2021 LDV Insights report, “Content & the Metaverse are Powered by Visual Tech”, where we examine the top visual tech trends that are now reshaping digital creation and identify the unique business opportunities to support creation over the next five years.

The internet was not always considered “real life”, but now we live as much online as we do in person and this will only continue post-pandemic. We work, date, laugh with grandparents, play games, attend cooking classes, concerts, church services & dinner parties; we participate in politics, appear at court, go to school, shop, visit doctors - all via computer screens.

We find ourselves in the midst of an evolution: digital is another dimension of our human existence. Even post-lockdown, people spend 13 hrs of their day online, on average. As we embrace digital life, it is only natural that we choose to represent and express ourselves in new ways online. We want to digitally express our thoughts, tastes, styles, talents … our creativity.

To showcase our personality and uniqueness online in the same ways we do in person, we are participating more than ever before in generating unique content. Breakthroughs in visual tech tools for creation, publication, moderation and monetization are fueling the next evolution of content creation.

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