Musinsa Used's T-shirt and jeans, left, and sport jersey and shorts are shown in these fitting images generated by AI. Courtesy of Musinsa
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the fashion industry for both makers and consumers in Korea. Leapfrogging conventional practices in which offline stores display items and visitors try them on before purchase, the trade has become more oriented for e-commerce where shopping no longer requires visiting shops in person to nail the right choices.
The online technologies are also supporting businesses by making their trading platforms more sensitive to consumer demands so that visiting customers can find more reasons to spend money. To manage stocks and workforce, AI has also become a rising force wielding the highest levels of efficiency and precision.
Fashion is one of those industries where AI has brought unprecedented waves of change. To survive, Korean companies are adapting to the new frontiers. And some of them have already accomplished eye-catching updates.
Major fashion retailer LF last month introduced a “virtual fitting service” for its British heritage brand Barbour. The brand’s official Korean website is now supported by Ottok VTON, a virtual clothing try-on solution developed by Samatti, a fashion AI firm. Visitors can upload their photos on the website and the platform uses the photos to show a simulated image of the customers wearing a selected outfit.
Activated by clicking on the “AI fitting” button, the result is detailed enough to show selected clothing patterns, textures and silhouettes on the uploaded photos.
Barbour’s Korean online store offers a virtual fitting service that allows customers to upload their photos and see AI-generated images of themselves wearing selected outfits without visiting a physical store. Courtesy of LF
“The biggest concern when buying premium clothing online is the uncertainty of ‘Will it look good on me?’ This technology allows customers to make more confident purchasing decisions,” an LF official said.
Musinsa, the country’s largest fashion retailer, has launched a model context protocol technology for Kakao’s e-commerce platform to enable more powerful customized recommendations for customers. Based on OpenAI’s agentic commerce protocol, the technology enables the platform to dissect customers’ mentions of time, place, occasion, weather and brand preferences by initiating a conversation. The information detected makes up the AI’s recommendations.
AI has also improved precision for Musinsa’s product search engines and product data summary features to improve customer satisfaction. Filtered search has seen its result-match precision improve from 88.1 percent to 96.2 percent. The platform has seen a boost in accuracy when carrying out searches, with the number of matching product search results jumping from 230 to 1,000 daily.
Source: Korea Times News
