Invited talk — China Academy of Art
CAD AI in Fashion: Automating Pattern Cutting
“I came into AI from fashion design, initially bothered by the inefficiency of traditional iterative sampling. I found it wasteful and draining, and the waste I was creating for my studies was piling up in my London bedroom. We all know that is far worse at scale.”
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I am an AI engineer and researcher specialising in geometry, supply chain and innovative manufacturing methods in the fashion industry, building AI engines that have the potential to automate processes and reduce waste at scale.
I came into AI from fashion design, initially bothered by the inefficiency of traditional iterative sampling. I found it wasteful and draining, and the waste I was creating for my studies was piling up in my London bedroom. We all know that is far worse at scale.
Through my AI studies and professional work, I also realised that the fashion industry is slow to adopt new technologies, and I was part of that too. Learning 3D software like CLO took time I didn’t have, time I would rather have spent touching real fabric and understanding its weight and stretch, designing from the fabric rather than from the drawing. Many professionals share this experience, and in many places manual work remains cheaper than adopting new tools.
Comparing fashion with automotive, defence, architecture and other engineering disciplines showed me how much room there is to modernise fashion manufacturing. It also made it clear that new technologies must integrate seamlessly into established workflows rather than ask people to change everything. Some steps will take years to automate, but others can be automated now, and even a 10% reduction in lead time is massive at scale.
I am currently working on automating pattern cutting by combining a vision model pipeline with an ontology that encodes pattern-making knowledge. Encoding all of it takes time, so I am starting with specific garments, with the capacity to expand to others depending on the needs of factories and brands. Over time, these processes can reduce waste and cost and, in the longer term, make tailored garments accessible to everyone, as pattern alterations become natural at scale. During the presentation, I aim to show what I have been building so far, its accuracy, and how this technology can be integrated and developed further.
I believe agentic workflows are very promising for building these pipelines, in pattern cutting and in other parts of the fashion industry. What the industry needs most is openness about its pain points, so that researchers can help solve them and create growth through less waste worldwide.
I would like this presentation to inspire and open conversations with emerging and established professionals, manufacturers and brands, to demystify some of the marketing hype around AI, and to encourage everyone to experiment with agentic workflows and coding tools to speed up their work and reduce their own waste.