Smriti Irani announces trend forecasting institute at NIFT Chennai

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Feb 15, 2019

On February 14, the Minister for Textiles, Smriti Irani, announced a new project with the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Chennai to create India-specific fashion trend forecasting.

Irani travelled to Chennai to inaugurate the new Student Multi-Activity Centre and Girls Hostel at the NIFT Chennai campus and took the occasion to announce a new collaborative project between the government and NIFT. The project will use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to forecast fashion trends specifically for the Indian fashion market. Where before international agencies would dominate the market and merely adapt their Western trend forecasts for the Indian market, this project aims to start with India to forecast more accurately. 

“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,” said Irani as reported by the Press Trust of India.

“We have been taking western trends, analysing it and Indianising it so far,” the NIFT director general Sarada Muraleedharan corroborated. “Everybody in the business is buying these international references and that makes it very difficult.” The project also aims to account for the diversity in trends within India itself. “What is trendy in Cosmopolitan cities might not be so in Tier 3, 4, 5 cities,” explained Muraleedharan.

NIFT students will work with local artisans to understand trends as well as with technology. Muraleedharan described the project as an attempt to consolidate indigenous data.