January 2, 2023
In the run-up to our Interfacing the Future event, ‘Blurring the Divide’, I spoke with Richard Sullivan who is the Director of Design & Creative Technology at FARFETCH, the online luxury fashion retail platform. His mission is to utilise design and innovative technology to create FARFETCH experiences connecting people, products, and places online, offline, and anywhere else. Connecting the creators, curators, and customers of luxury fashion.
Our conversation began with Richard explaining FARFETCH to me, “It has the brands, the boutiques, the creators and curators of fashion. They are wanting to tell their stories and make people aware of their products, and then there’s the customers themselves.” So, the company has many different avenues to chart and is at the intersection of a love of fashion and revolutionary technology. Richard expands on this, “Where those two things intersect, there’s many ways that things like AI can be used; one is around size and fit, meaning how can you analyse people to make sure that the product is going to be the right fit for them. Every country has different sizes, different brands, and different ways of cutting patterns. So although the clothes are ready to wear, this is a broad term, and it doesn’t mean that it’s ready for you to wear in that particular size.”
The question of how the concept of luxury, involving all our senses, can be defined in a digital arena comes up in our conversation. I suggested that there are certain brands setting standards in the luxury space, for example, the level of intuition and design of Tesla cars. Richard says, “Yes, it’s branding, it’s pricing, and then it’s the craft and knowledge of what you’re buying into. It’s not hugely different from the art world. You might choose to pay £64m for a piece of artwork but then go and look at artwork, and you’ll find thousands of pieces, all amazingly creative. What was it about the one you paid so much for? On the surface you can look at anything and dumb it down, but then there’s an appreciation and understanding of the craft.”
I asked Richard how he felt luxury brand platforms might evolve to stay ahead in a digital world? “From a luxury industry perspective, I think that first up, new forms of creativity will open up for creators of luxury to explore, meaning new types of products, areas, and mechanics. The question is how will designers utilise these tools to create and understand what luxury is and why it’s sold at a premium? Digitally, it’s harder for people to construct in their minds, because the notion of limited materials, or resources, or fine materials is harder to grasp than in our non-digital real world.”
I suggested to Richard that when searching for something in the luxury space, it’s hard to find the right search term for the exact “feel” of what you want, as luxury is often synonymous with beautiful fabrics and so touch is important, even when looking for a relatively simple item such as a black A-line skirt. I wondered how “feel” would translate through the search. “I think it’s still coming from the input for us to be able to solve something,” answered Richard, “It doesn’t happen through serendipity. A skirt or dress in a specific material would need to be identified in the search.”
AI is of particular interest to Richard as he tells me, “The ability to scribe and search is key to using any of the tools, whether it’s Mid-journey or ChatGPT. You need the skills to be able to articulate and describe what is in your head. So the efficiencies come from your understanding of how to manipulate and advance the tools so that you can refine something to be in the form that you want it to be. Some agencies actually offer this as a service and one of the benefits of using them is that they understand how best to get you to the solution you want, as quickly as you want.”
In terms of curated fashion Richard sees the benefit of being able to ask and contextualise questions. He explains, “There’s the description of the product, such as ‘I want a green knitted sweater’, but there’s also the context of where you’re wearing something. Maybe, ‘I’m going out for dinner, I want an amazing dress’, ‘I don’t want to stand out too much but I want it to kind of look great’, or ‘I’m going to a wedding, I want something to wear’, or ‘I need a new pair of jeans and I’m always struggling to find the ones that fit’. Those are the areas around which questions are being asked at the moment.”
The search results give a level of detailed information to inspire a confident decision, but again it’s the way that people describe what they are searching for at the outset that still requires a level of expertise. Richard thinks, “It’s not going to be the fact that you’re going to lose your job to AI, it’s that you’re going to keep your job, but using AI. When designing we used to have example layouts of what a website or interface would look like, and that might take us days — with Photoshop it would take a long time. But you can see that just around the corner it’s going to be a very quick command and it comes down to your ability to be able to utilise the prompts. Designers will think about the story and then think about how they can communicate that to the user. I think as we move forward we’re going to use these tools to create those variants very quickly. Also it will help us validate the user experience much more quickly as well.”
The creative landscape is forever changing and developments in how we search for things will constantly evolve until it becomes part of the everyday. As Richard says, “Where we had yellow pages, now we have Google search that enables you to be more specific and go to what you want straight away. With each new development there’s a level of latency that’s reduced and within that comes the magic, but now I want to know how I can create something even quicker”
What does the future hold for creatives in the digital world? Richard thinks that it will be in the hands of the people coming out of art schools in a few years time, for whom digital design will be second nature. He thinks it’s the new players who will shape how this will be used, “It’s in the hands of the creatives. New technology will build on the input at the moment. When you’re young you’re more likely to take risks and do things you don’t necessarily understand but can be filtered through the tools.”
Richard ponders a technology-filled future, “I think about my son. He’s four now so even when he’s ten the technology will be completely different. With augmented reality and the advent of on demand and manufacturing, it’s all evolving. We love it but then we’re afraid that this thing will make us redundant. When we think about the reasons we go to work, apart from keeping a roof over our heads and food on our tables, it gives us a purpose. You become fearful that you might lose that but those fears are allayed when you think that we all change and move forward despite the new fangled inventions.”
Pedalling back to me trying to find the right feel and fabric for a garment, Richard says, “You mentioned materials and that’s a real craft, that’s an understanding of what makes one product better quality and more luxurious than another. If you don’t know just by looking at the aesthetic of a product, one looks better than the other, you’ll be asking why is it double the price? How do I look after it? Can I resell it? All those are questions that FARFETCH has been so successful in answering and being able to match people to products.”
Digital design will evolve to become technically brilliant, but Richard again emphasises that without a story, there’s something missing — there’s no feeling, no explanation of why you’ve done it, or what made you think of it, or why it’s cool. Richard believes that there’s always a story behind why something is created and this gives it its soul. He explains, “That is what people bring to a product. We love to hear the story or find something in there that is a cultural piece. It may be borne out of rebellion or a creative entity. Street, for example, comes out of music and culture and is a reflection of those things and that’s what makes people want to do it as much as the materials and quality.” Remembering his days at art school, Richard says, “You used to look at magazines and books to get a reference, fast forward 15 years and you are on stock sites, now it’s Google. Fast forward again and you just say what you want to a device and it shows it straight away. It’s just evolutions of the same thing and now technology has enabled you to do that in a way that gets you to a point quicker. Anyone, anywhere in the world has access to the same information so the playing field has opened up to more people. I remember when David Bowie was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman in the late nineties and they were talking about the internet. Bowie said ‘It’s going to revolutionise how we think and be exciting and fearful’. Well, this is the next stage of that. We got comfortable with the internet and now there are new things that are not so comfortable.”
“Circling back to fashion”, says Richard, “That’s what fashion is. It’s the story that’s told and you are buying into those stories and an alignment to them. To me the exciting part of the future is how we use these tools to create things that we don’t really think about at the moment. Those categories, product ranges, that we’re not yet sure about. Exciting, scary and interesting. Stories are still important, we just tell them in a different way using the newest tools to help us articulate their magic.”
