NEW YORK — On Sunday, influential voices from across luxury fashion, technology and retail convened for an intimate cocktail during New York Fashion Week at the iconic Hotel Chelsea. The event, ‘Fashion in a New Era of Technology & Innovation’, was co-hosted by The Business of Fashion and Kate Davidson Hudson, founder and chief executive of luxury shopping and styling app, Vêtir.
Designers and creative directors Prabal Gurung, Sergio Rossi, Paul Andrew, Jennifer Fisher, Timo Weiland and Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada, alongside fashion insiders like Rachel Zoe, Sai De Silva and Jessel Taank engaged with entrepreneurs including Patricia Bonaldi, Nancy Twine, Sherri McCullen, SpreeAI’s John Imah and Fashion Fair Cosmetics’ Desirée Rogers. Brand executives from the likes of Versace, Google, Snapchat and NN07 were also in attendance. The event sparked animated conversations that spanned from the role artificial intelligence plays in personalisation to the future of luxury retail and its technological evolutions.
Hudson’s Vêtir reflects the kind of innovation driving change in the industry today. The AI-driven platform caters to clients by offering a shopping ecosystem through personalised AI-generative search and styling, closet digitisation, virtual try-on and an individually curated marketplace featuring products from brand partners.
The platform addresses the growing consumer interest in engaging with next-generation tools, with 79 percent of customers surveyed by Google in 2024 saying they would find AI product recommendations helpful to facilitate their shopping experience, 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 told BoF.
Guests in attendance discussed the kind of opportunities next-generation platforms and tools like Vêtir unlock across the value chain, to drive forward the future of the fashion industry — as well as the constraints it can create, but also overcome.
“I’m a big believer in technology as a tool,” content creator Alejandra Rojas told BoF at the event. “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, internet personality and designer of PatBO, expressing excitement for the next evolution of technology that encapsulated the evening’s spirit of collaboration and forward-thinking innovation.
Many designers in attendance were focused on the opportunity to improve their sustainability impact through new technologies — from returns to sampling to recycling — as well as cutting unnecessary overheads.
Hillary Taymour, creative director at womenswear brand 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 creative director of lingerie brand CouCou Intimates, spoke of the opportunity tech offers in reducing waste in the samples process: “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, emerging designer Amir Taghi was focused on how these “kinds of innovations will help further e-commerce and lessen returns” — a major impact on the bottom line, but also on a retailer’s carbon footprint from the transportation emissions to the packaging and often product waste.
Designer Elena Velez is also focused on the cutting back of business overheads through 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 a big believer in technology as a tool. But you need someone to really curate it.
— Alejandra Rojas
A number of attendees also shared with BoF their hope for next-generation technology’s broadening of global opportunities and conversations.
Abrima Erwiah, founder of fashion lifestyle brand and social enterprise Studio 189, said: “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 creator Jessel Taank shared a “hope that technology is able to open the doors to bigger and better storytelling”.
Looking to the future, guests spoke about the mindset evolution of the industry and its future workforce in adopting these new technologies.
“Naturally, the industry loves to embrace it,” says John Imah, founder of virtual 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, global head of fashion and beauty 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 will be the next generations — Gen Z, Gen Alpha and Gen Beta — that will “redefine how tech lives in the newer economy”.
Looking ahead, Hudson remains confident about luxury retail’s future, sharing a particular focus on the developments in agentic AI — the proactive application of generative AI tools that allows systems to not just generate outputs, but also act as autonomous agents.
“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 possible in partnership with Vêtir. Special thanks to Hotel Chelsea for hosting this gathering.