Park Ji-won is a writer for The Korea Times who has been covering a wide range of topics from Korea’s culture to its politics. An avid journalism enthusiast to the core, Ji-won brings a thoughtful and unique perspective to every topic she covers. On weekends, you'll often find her contemplating life’s purpose on a yoga mat — with a cup of quality tea in hand. A native Korean speaker by birth and fluent in English through her work, she went to college in Japan and is learning Chinese and French — hoping to add Polish, Russian and Thai to the mix.
Startup uses AI for fashion design
Designovel CEO Shin Ki-young
By Park Ji-won
By Park Ji-won
In November last year, a hoodie designed by artificial intelligence (AI) and made by Hyundai's Handsome attracted media attention. It was the first time for a fashion company in Korea to make clothing with AI amid increasing collaborations across industries to introduce the technology to new businesses.
Hyundai's Handsome brand SJYP hoodie Courtesy of Designovel
Designovel, a data-based fashion tech company, was behind its creation. The company uses artificial intelligence in creating fashion designs for its customers, which include Hyundai and other sports and fashion brands, and collecting data throughout the world to provide fashion trend reports, which is a still rare business here.
Designovel's co-CEO Shin Ki-young, 34, a former Samsung employee, said on Tuesday, “While production skills were developing, design skills appeared to remain the same in the fashion industry. And as Korea's fashion industry has been largely dependent on people's physical labor, there was little room for technology to get involved. So we thought our skill could contribute to the industry to make a less labor-intensive environment.”
He originally wanted to become a good CEO as his dream job. That's why he studied business at university and went to work for Samsung and IBM. However, while working at the companies, he realized that simply having marketing and financing skills was not enough to run his own business. He thought that he should learn about one of the “future fields,” such as biotechnology, IT, telecommunication or software, eventually settling on software as it was most accessible for him.
Later, he studied natural language processing at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and found colleagues to launch the current company.
He ended up running a fashion-based tech company after a series of failures in launching startup firms. He was looking for business items which can be helpful for the country's industries and could use his skills.
He eyed the fact that fashion is one of Korea's key industries with skillful designers and a competent fashion cluster here which is in decline. He was inspired by U.S. fashion firm Stich fix, which provides personal styling based on data and data processing, which he studied in graduate school.
He said it might be hard for the firm's technology to provide creative designs, but it can easily find an average trending design by taking advantage of superhuman processing speeds.
“It is basic for a fashion designer to gather information about fashion trends, which was done manually and took a long time. Our AI technology can cut labor and time in the basic steps.”
He stresses his firm's fashion technology can also help Korea's labor-intensive fashion industry in the long term to create a better environment for both big and small firms by letting the technology do repetitive work.
His firm is now collaborating with a large retailing firm, which he left unnamed, and planning to release more AI-designed clothes this year.
Regarding concerns over the removal of human labor and potential job loss, he said, “Every process cannot be automated by fashion AI. But it will create synergy with designers. Still, AI cannot become a designer. It will remain as an assistant. A human needs to make a final decision. But what we do is help people to get more creative by securing more time thanks to AI technology.”
Designovel's data processing Courtesy of Designovel