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I admire and respect Ms Shulman, not least because even as she was introducing this new breakthrough, she had the mettle to pinpoint a potential drawback in one part of the technology in which her host is a leading player... that of consumer preference.

I have written before about e-commerce developments that are, in the next few years, going to transform retail (I will confine myself to talking about womenswear fashion here). There are going to be advances in every direction, and one of these will almost certainly include virtual department stores. These online stores will be made up of many different retailers, a unique entity for each customer, and will be filled with apparel that will fit not only the customer's body, but her heart and mind too. Technology of the type that Fits.me has developed is already able to track a customer's ever-changing body size and shape, along with fit preference, and match this knowledge with expert analysis of garment properties to give the customer the information needed to choose a perfect fit when buying apparel online.

But there are other equally important customer preferences to that of fit. Every day giant strides are being made in the understanding of all manner of other customer preferences (otherwise known as 'taste'), and using these to investigate and curate relevant products available at any given time, to place them under the customer's eye. These, ultimately, will form the 'virtual department store' that I mentioned.

What's not to like here? The customer will go online, click on her familiar website, and see only those items that will fit and suit her. More than this, using information mined from her history, as well as her personal input, she will only be shown items that she is likely to like . What kind of colours does she appreciate? Does she seek sustainable fashion? Is she a fully paid-up member of a fashion 'tribe'? Does she have preferences about fabrics or patterns? How modestly does she like to dress? Is she a fashion risk-taker...? There are thousands of tiny points of contact that a woman has with her world, each of which leaves a minute footprint by which her personality can be understood. These, added to what information she is motivated to volunteer, will paint an ever more accurate portrait of her as a consumer of fashion.

Yet Shulman made a highly cogent point in her talk. If we only listen to our own echoes, we are ever-diminishing. If we travel a path down a hall of mirrors, we are unlikely to see anything much of the world. We won't even know what it is we don't know!

Recent political developments have shown that we can become hemmed-in by a technology that only shows us that which has been assessed to be compatible with the worldview that we already have. With social media, current events are being served up as ready-meals: not very nutritious, and with a bland taste that palls after a while.

People often see fashion as a trivial subject. I am not of this opinion. Fashion is a way that the population stitches itself together in unexpected ways. Some people differentiate themselves from their peers (sometimes channelling the unknown or bizarre), whilst others cling on to their tribe. Others still, burrow into their own culture to find buried treasure – the strange roots of the familiar. The choice is ours. Our eyes are opened wide by the geniuses amongst us; we are shown the whole world when we look at fashion – and we shape fresh personas with our own will and originality, or display our lack of those qualities with a clichéd or safe style.

But choice is needed to do this – and it has to be our own. I for one would hate to think that I might in the future lose out on seeing the silly, the ugly, the weird, the impractical, the unexpectedly gorgeous, and the beyond aspirational on my browser. If something has automatically removed all of these, then they have also shrunk something in my life.

I went to art school, and a photography tutor told me that in order to take good pictures you have to have your camera with you at all times. He said that if you only had your camera when you were anticipating getting a worthwhile photograph, then you would be limited to obtaining solely the type of image that you were expecting.

So my suggestion as antidote to this hall of mirrors is something I'm calling 'Flow'. Flow is a system that mines the latest fashion and cultural images and collates them into streams of differing trends. Anyone who knows anything about the inner workings of fashion knows all about this – it's how the latest colours and trends are predicted, and it's been done for many decades.

However, my idea of Flow is for the public – not the industry insiders. In my mind the original Flow – called Pure Flow – is run 24/7 by bots continually assessing and compiling the latest, most influential images from (human) designers and creators in the world of fashion, art, celebrity, photography, interior or product design, music, theatre and film... collating them into related streams. These will be the images that are shown on TV, are popular on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, online and print magazines, films, publicity, etc.

Certain features marking them as related will help these images or cultural trends to be collated into animated mood-boards. For example, a stream could comprise the following set of images: Various vintage-inspired printed patterns or stripes in cool colours, made into a sumptuous silk quilt. Photographs of natural ocean scenes and Nordic landscapes. Clean Swedish interiors; sapphire jewellery in white gold, or silver. Art Deco liquid metallic apparel from a 1930s Hollywood film, modern Japanese Celadon ceramics. Scandinavian vintage silver teaspoons. Cate Blanchett wearing a white silk trouser suit. These are just less than a minute's worth of images that could go towards a stream called 'Nordic Ice'.

This Pure Flow is the raw end of the service. These streams are shown to those who wish to sign up to them on the side of their screen while they are browsing content. They will periodically flick from one to another (there will be many separate streams), and the client will be able to delete certain streams from her flow if she finds them irksome. Each stream will usually only last a few days, or at the most, months, when a look naturally runs out of steam. No images are ever repeated, except when they are automatically plucked from different media. This is a very democratic system: the average consumer will have all the latest knowledge that only high-ranking fashion insiders presently have. Any style elite or fashion-forward insight will be created solely through natural individual qualities of talent, sensitivity and sophistication.

The individual images will change fairly quickly, but the user can click on any one at any moment to get full details. She can also slow a stream down to look at it in more detail.

The next stage of Flow is commercial, and it's called Flow.co. In this, the bots use the images from Pure Flow and link them up to fashion products. The client is likely to click on a stream on Pure Flow that she is particularly taken with, and wishes to have access to this type of look. She will then be put through to the part of Flow.co that is working on that particular stream.

This Flow.co system could be something as simple as finding the original piece of fashion that was in the image in the stream (a dress from Balenciaga, for example), and then, if it were available in a form that suited the price-point and size preferences of the user, offers the dress for immediate sale. It may be, though (as it is with most high fashion) that the dress imaged is not available at that moment (high fashion photography usually references apparel between six months and a year in advance), nor in the size (many designer dresses are not made in 'adult human' sizes), nor at the price point (if this were a couture dress, only a tiny portion of the public would be able to afford it), or the preference (many women do not have the opportunity to use, or the desire for, a full-length silk dress). So the Flow.co image would be tasked to show a further, more accessible set of items.

There may be a high street version of a similar dress, or jumpsuit, blouse or even a pair of shoes that has a similar colour combination, pattern, style or vibe. There may just be a ring or a handbag that echoes the feel. If required, everything shown by Flow.co is commercially available in the size, fit preference and price-point of the user. It may be somewhat removed from the original image. However, it's a way for the user to be swept off her feet by catching the coat tails of a passing fashion whimsy.

Moving onwards to Wave Flow, we see the Flow idea taken to a greater area of commerce, which it is not all about fashion. The Wave Flow images are related to all sorts of other items that link in terms of aesthetics, and everything... and nothing... else. Thus, that Balenciaga dress may reference a peeling wooden door, photographed in Crete (you can click on a relevant airbnb), a glass sculpture of a jellyfish created by the Blaschka brothers (as shown in a museum exhibition nearby) – see below , Roman mosaic floor on a Greek island (hotel availability), a pair of earrings (for your pierced ears, within your price point), some kitchen tiles (available online), an Impressionist painting in the Musée d'Orsay (accessed via Eurostar).


The commercial part of Flow does use certain customer preferences in the technology; they will guide you towards items at your price-point, in your size and fit preference, and which are also available in your marketplace. Pure Flow will sit naturally alongside any 'virtual department stores' that the customer frequents, offering a counterpoint to it. Thus the client will be able to create her own diet by shopping what she knows well and trusts, nourished by the preferences algorithm – while seasoning it with the changeability and originality that is unique to creative human beings. This is because there is no editing of the style content of Pure Flow, which represents the ideas being spun on a moment-to-moment basis out of the world's aesthetic centre of gravity at any one given moment.

By watching the streams, the user will be able to turn a blank page with her taste. If she frequented nothing but her safe curated stores, the most she could hope for would be that her style will slowly evolve over time. Yet if she is a personality that is susceptible, she may regularly 'jump out of her own skin' when inspired by Flow.

She will see the latest thinking of the style-makers, visual influencers, creatives and cultural architects, and be able to spin on a sixpence to alter and create a new aesthetic persona using her own will – possibly driven by nothing more than a whim.

Our customers were usually stunned by the results of having clothing specially tailored, and many of them wrote to us in gratitude: Emma Plus testimonials.

I love accuracy and fit, but I have no respect for the measurements and sizes that can cause stress.  I don't care what size a person takes, and I am passionately against any kind of sizeist hierarchy.  Every generation has its own preferred fit: today's young girls have their own style, and it was our job to 'get' people.

Now I have moved into a new exciting arena – that of e-commerce fitting.  This is something that someone like me... an old timer who has had decades of hands-on experience of larger bodies... needs to embrace to help solve the dreadful fit problems that have plagued this young branch of the fashion industry.  It's my opportunity to take the inequality, embarrassment, inconvenience, waste, frustration, disappointment, irritation and expense of buying plus-size clothing online – and do my bit to help solve these problems, once and for all.

The good news is that it will soon be possible to accommodate women of every size – from 'mainstream' to plus-size – in e-commerce, with fashion that fits just as beautifully as I was able to achieve in a bricks-and-mortar store.  In the meantime, while we are perfecting the AI fitting that will give us the fashion we deserve, in the styles and fits that suit our needs, I may be coming to somewhere near you.

I am part of a team tasked with finding out the sizes and shapes of plus-size womenswear customers.  So, should our paths cross, if you are a larger woman, I may ask you if I can record some of your measurements.

I promise that it will be a perfectly pleasant experience, that it will be over in a jiffy, and that we will have a bit of a laugh – even though it's a serious matter.  We have a job to do to – there are few things more serious than the business of getting gorgeous clothes for ourselves.  I'm hoping that you will help.

Even though I've been in the bodyshape, fit and customer service business all my professional life, there were several seminal moments in his talk (quite appropriate for a seminar, after all).  One that will live with me until my dying day was when Paul showed images of women who did not have 'standard' bodyshapes (i.e. their hips and bust may be a size 10, but the waist was a size 8, or their bust and waist was a size 12, but their hips were a size 10).  While they were on screen he asked what we noticed about these images.  Actually, it was nothing at all... which was rather the point.

These women's figures (they were computer generated, so no models were hurt in the making of the talk) were perfectly normal looking – even beautiful and aspirational.  Paul made the point that should have been obvious.  These bodies looked normal, because they were  normal.  It's far more usual to see figures that do not fit into the classic standardised sizing that our clothes are made to.  They are the shapes that we all see in the real world.

As I sat down at the desk yesterday I aspired to give similar revelations to my audience – it never hurts to aim high!  I'm lucky in that the subject I was talking about (the webinar was entitled 'Womenswear Sizing: Consistency versus Diversity') is one that involves every person I know... why is it so difficult to find well-fitting clothes and what is being done about it?

These shows have various aspects in common.  The first is that they are big – CPD occupies a huge exhibition space in Düsseldorf, Germany, for example, and in the UK the shows usually take place at Excel, Olympia or the NEC.

They contain stands displaying the next season's fashions, complete with samples and the ordering paraphernalia necessary to run one of the world's most important industries.  Buyers and agents walk swiftly or huddle over tablets – time is money in this environment and business has to be transacted quickly.

At the heart of each of these fairs is the catwalk.  It often runs down the centre of the space, and the music from catwalk shows can be heard across the hall.  Models stride out wearing the samples – time travellers from the future, telling us what we will be wearing in a year or so.

In between the catwalk shows, the runway is given over to the seminars.  This is where senior fashion insiders offer their insight, experience, knowledge and ideas to fellow professionals.  It's considered a mark of respect to be invited to give one of these presentations, and they are always good value.  Despite having a million other things to do at a show, I have often taken time to sit-in on seminar programmes, as I've found they offer fascinating information and thought-provoking perceptions.

So when I was invited to give a seminar in August at the UK's premier fashion show – Moda – which takes place twice yearly at the NEC in Birmingham, I was very honoured.  As a bodyshape and fit expert I am now working with the leading e-commerce fit experts, Rakuten Fits Me, and I was excited by the opportunity to talk about fit issues to fashion professionals.

In the past apparel was sold through bricks-and-mortar stores and customers were able to try on clothing before making their purchases.  Now more and more transactions are happening online, and suddenly – without being able to 'try-before-you-buy' – fit issues have become huge news.  One significant problem is the level of returns generated by the current somewhat hit-and-miss method of buying clothes online.

We need to use all the available expertise in bodyshape, fit, garment technology and online technology to move into the next phase of fashion retail.  The opportunities are fantastic.  This is already a very positive story, and I was delighted to get the opportunity to talk to Moda about it.



READ the full transcript.

READ Fits.me blog post: 'Rakuten Fits Me talk inconsistent sizing at Moda?'.

REGISTER for the next Rakuten webinar on 6 September 2017: 'The issues of fit – specifically consistency vs diversity in women's clothing sizes'.