H2020 supports fashion predictor
A project backed by Horizon 2020 will allow European SMEs to anticipate fashion trends.
The Innotex Centre/INTEXTER of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain, will lead the Horizon 2020-backed European project, which aims to develop new software that can predict fashion trends that are likely to be most successful by objectively assessing billions of images that have been tracked and viewed on social networks.
Eight companies and technology centres – Catalan, Spanish, Italian, English and German – have begun to develop the innovative smart system known as SOMATCH (Support IT solution for creative fashion designers by integrated software systems to collect, define and visualize textile and clothing trends through innovative image analysis from open data). The technology will principally analyse images published on Twitter, Instagram and the blogs of some of the world’s most influential figures in fashion. It’s envisaged that the technology will obtain objective indicators for predicting future fashion trends.
The Horizon 2020 project, also called ‘SOMATCH’ (Support IT solution for creative fashion designers by integrated software systems to collect, define and visualize textile and clothing trends through innovative image analysis from open data), is running for 18 months after beginning at the start of 2015. The innovation action has a total budget of €1.2m, after receiving just over €975,000 from the European Commission.
Project co-ordinator José Antonio Tornero comments: “To make a shirt, a small business may perform up to 66,000 virtual combinations of yarn, textures and colours.
“Of these 66,000 possible combinations, only 3% are selected for collections. Of this 3%, only half, i.e. 1,000 combinations, are finally selected for manufacture, and only 500 different types of shirt end up in the shops. This process involves an extraordinary effort for the 60% of companies in Europe that have fewer than 50 employees.”
It is hoped that SOMATCH will enable SMEs to access the restricted field of objective predictions of fashion trends, a field to which only the industry’s major brands, with large human resources, currently have access. The project’s managers anticipate that using the SOMATCH system could save European SMEs €8bn a year.
