We live in a customer-centric regime, which places the consumer at the center of the new digital ecosystem, for two main reasons: because it produces data that is increasingly the true product of the new attention economy; because thanks to this data it is possible to know, predict and increasingly involve consumer choices.
The use of theartificial intelligence in fashion it will greatly expand the process of centralization and customization of the offer, so as to involve even the most conceptual and creative part, which historically belonged to the stylist.
Dress Coding, the new book by Nello Barile
But all this what impact it will have on cognition of the consumer?
In the early XNUMXs, futurist Alvin Toffler debuted the book Future Shock, in which he listed with extreme precision the main transformations that technology would induce in society and in the market within a few years.
Among these he had already insisted on the hyper-choice issue to highlight how the new capitalism was implementing highly complex and diversified supply strategies that exploited automation and revolutionized the relationship between companies and consumers. Even then, for Barile, the passage that would lead from the micro-segmentation of the market to the active integration of the consumer into the production chain appeared clear, the direct repercussions of which on the cultural sphere called into question the theories that instead had insisted on the growing homogenization of consumption practices.
Although some aspects of the Toffler's "Prophecy". they were too influenced by science fiction, its substantial core was realized so much that today, underlines Barile, we are talking about a new customer-centric regime managed by digital platforms.
This scheme has somehow been prepared by mass customization of the nineties, as the culmination of the so-called post-Fordism which introduced technical and organizational innovations in order to deliver products and services with a high level of differentiation.
The decisive prerequisite in this revolution lies in the need of companies to cultivate a holistic concept of quality that involves the relationship with the consumer. Over the last few decades, in fact, he has demonstrated an ever-increasing expertise in consumption indications when instead this activity, in the dominant period of Fordism-Taylorism, was understood as passive and automatic.
In mass production, the relationship with the customer - based on his anonymity - was sacrificed for the benefit of immediate and widespread availability of goods. In mass customization, by contrast, each transaction represents an increase in the firm's knowledge of the customer's idiographic characteristics. A feedback that can be mediated by the point of sale or disintermediated via the network.
The principle through which the first strategies of this kind were born is that of modularization, which has allowed companies to produce increasingly personalized goods. It is based on the economy-of-scale manufacturing of basic components that can be reassembled in different ways to offer relatively diverse products.
The advent of digital: the future of digital technologies
This happens with the decisive support of digital technologies which, the author points out, are not simple mass media added to traditional media such as television, radio and cinema.
Digital is more than anything else a new environment capable of incorporate all previous media and to reconfigure social and economic relations both in quantitative terms and, above all, in qualitative terms.
Ithe digital it completely and profoundly pervades every sphere of contemporary culture, economy and creativity. For Barrel, in the next future, the use of chatbots will tend to replace the relationship between brand and consumer with that between artificial intelligence systems and digital assistants. Chatbots allow you to automate the relationship with an increasingly profiled customer. In this way they help shift the focus of fashion from the designer's style to the consumer-user performativity.
According to Luce, in fashion artificial intelligence can represent a technology ›« instructive», nthe sense of disruption, of substitution, not only with respect to communication processes, but also with creative ones. As in some applications by IBM/Watson and Google which aim to replace the role of the designer by proposing models designed on the characteristics of consumers transformed into data streams.
From single channel to omnichannel
We go fromera of the single channel, i.e. from the single physical store as the only channel for the purchase of fashion products, to that of the multi-channel in which new sales channels are added, such as e-commerce, passing through the cross-channel in which different channels integrate offering the user a unique experience, to then reach omnichannel in which different integrated channels are transformed into an environment that surrounds the user-data generator.
The real problem, he points out Barrel, that the omnichannel try to fix is the missing link between experience online, of which almost everything is known, and experience offline of which very little is known.
The possibility of linking the two levels would offer companies an even more powerful tool for understanding and predicting customer choices.
Il future of retail it is a problem that arouses great interest not only from the point of view of fashion brands and hi-tech companies, but also from the local administrations, concerned by the process of desertification of public places, as a consequence of the new commercial hegemony of platforms and even more recently to the pandemic crisis.
The case study of concept store in Manhattan, Called story, it is particularly significant of the integration between technologies and physical space in the so-called experiential retail.
The same name semantically plays with the terms store and storytelling, i.e. a physical place set up to involve the visitor in a composite narrative.
According to Rachel Shetchman, its founder, the shop of the future should have a curatorial approach capable of engaging the customer's interest, and should also change every 4-8 weeks as if it were an art gallery, offering an experience that remains in the memory . Finally sell your own products. In Story the brands tell about themselves starting from their uniqueness.
The use of intelligent technologies, based on the machine learning, allows you to monitor consumer behavior: anonymous facial recognition systems, emotions tracking, fitting room technologies, mobile identification tracking, RFID, video analytics.
These are innovative technologies that are classified by McStay as «empathic media», or capable of recognizing human emotions and interacting with them.
Thus, from the experiential retail described by Stephens, we move on to the "augmented" one, which uses augmented reality and empathetic media to enhance the consumer experience.
Metaverse: concept and characteristics
Il Metaverse concept, formulated by Cyberpunk literature in the nineties, is today the focus of great interest from consumers and companies for various reasons:
- It is an opportunity to relaunch platforms in crisis.
- It is the collector of a series of innovative and paid services such as NFTs and new gamification strategies.
- It is the point of connection between the physical and virtual world which will imply further problems of protection of the personal data of its users.
One of the features of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution is the dynamic integration between the digital/virtual and physical dimensions or, to use the words of Klaus Schwab, the interaction between three main megatrends: physical, digital, biological.
For Barile, one of the technologies characterizing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the blockchain, mostly known for being the technological infrastructure that gives life to the market for cryptocurrency.
It is able to certify the ownership and authenticity of the NFTs (Non-fungible tokens), thereby giving a mere set of data, generally reproducible, a kind of uniqueness. There is therefore, in fact, no difference between the copy and the original in the context of digital products, except for the Blockchain code which certifies their uniqueness.
According to Karinna Grant, co-founder of The Dematerialised – a platform which various fashion brands are entering, such as Gucci, Prada, Rebecca Minkoff – there are basically three ways to use digitized clothing:
- Wear them through Augmented Reality.
- Dress up your avatars.
- Coin them as NFTs to collect and trade.
If the current trend insists mainly on NFTs, in the future the flexibility of the Metaverse it will aim to increasingly incorporate and integrate the physical space.
Meta in this case realizes Zuckerberg's initial dream, but expands it to a hitherto unthinkable level, not only of exploitation of virtual fashion, but also of integration between virtual and physical space, or of further invasion, exploitation and monetization of the daily life of its users.
The current debate about Metaverse is hard fought but the author believes and Fashion destined to finally arrive at it, due to its innate ability to simulate and dissimulate, even if the ways in which this will happen are currently experimental and only partially conceivable.
After all, the fashion has always demonstrated its ability to learn and take from the various strata of society in which it is present, as Barile has amply illustrated throughout the text, analyzing, for example, the representative cases of the constant relationship between the forms of fashion and those of the street style. As well as the ability to adapt to social and cultural changes with ease and versatility. Today, much of fashion and luxury reinterprets, quotes or simply plunders street style. But one globalized street style, which has now become the dominant logic and aesthetic in the hands of the big brands which has lost much of its original content.
Barile wonders how ethical the attitude of fashion is or should be towards the things of the world and he certainly finds solidarity in the reader when he reveals how weak the will to undermine our cognitive dependence on the empire of the ephemeral, from the quintessence of the spectacularization of the body in everyday life.
A book, "Dress Coding” by Nello Barile, which actually seem like ten, for the vastness of the topics covered and, above all, for the precision with which they are treated by the author, who helps the reader in the exploration of a multifaceted world that fascinates and stuns, captures and enchants and yet , at the same time, confronts all of us with our greatest weaknesses, with our knowingly but joyfully "dehumanizing" ourselves by seeing our smug avatar in his new "skin".
The book
In the Barrel, Dress coding. Fashion and styles from the street to the Metaverse, Meltemi Publisher, Milan, 2022.
The author
Nello Barile: professor of Sociology of Media and Fashion Sociology at the IULM University of Milan. Author of monographs, articles and national and international contributions on digital media, consumption and political communication.
