This Showstopping Met Gala Dress Was Unfairly Eclipsed By Claire Danes
High fashion meets high technology.
Claire Danes and her light-up Zac Posen dress stole the spotlight at the 2016 Met Gala, but there was another, even-more-perfect dress that everyone missed.
Karolina Kurkova and IBM's Watson nailed the "Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology" theme with the Cognitive Dress.
You may know Karolina as a former VS Angel, and you may know Watson as the computer that won Jeopardy in 2011.
More recently, Watson has been making sense of the unstructured data (think social media posts) that make up 80% of internet information to help businesses, doctors and organizations around the world.
Designers Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig explained how Watson helped design the dress by studying Marchesa's previous dresses to create a common color palette and analyzing which fabrics would be best suited for the design itself.
And while the dress was beautiful all on its own, with more than 120 individually-cut flowers, its most show-stopping quality came to the fore during the red carpet walk.
The LED lights in each of the flowers actually changed colors in real time based on the emotions Watson processed from social media reactions.
Yeah, Watson processed the emotions of your Tweets and immediately responded in the dress itself.
Yes, this stunning dress learned from your social media reactions and actually changed colors in front of our eyes. Now that's a true collaboration of high technology and high fashion.
