A project that will help India forecast fashion trends on its own is on the anvil, Union Minister Smriti Irani said Thursday.
Inaugurating a Student Multi-Activity Centre and Girls Hostel at the NIFT-Chennai campus, Irani said, "Let me say this, one of the first attempts in Indian fashion and textile industry to forecast fashion, use of fabric, colour will find a foot in this campus of NIFT Chennai."
The initiative, which will utilise Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques, is aimed at making India self-reliant on forecasting fashion trends, which has been the monopoly of international agencies.
Corroborating details of the project, NIFT Director General Sarada Muraleedharan said India has been a very difficult market in terms of understanding what Indian trends are.
"We have been taking western trends, analysing it and Indianising it so far. Everybody in the business is buying these international references and that makes it very difficult," she said.
Calling it an attempt to consolidate indigenous data, Muraleedharan said, "What is trendy in Cosmopolitan cities might not be so in Tier 3, 4, 5 cities.
Even a regular tailor can have a sense of trend and understand it, but who is going to consolidate such information or who has access to such information..."
It is important that Indian trends get articulated and influence the global market. For this there are plans to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning techniques, she said.
NIFT students would also be collaborating with local artisans to pick up trends, she added.
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