The world’s first Cognitive Dress, created by IBM Watson and Marchesa, and brought to life by everyone who saw it.

The 2016 Met Gala’s theme was Manus x Machina — hand vs. machine. The red carpet would be full of celebrities modeling tech-themed designs, like Taylor Swift in Louis Vuitton and Beyoncé in Givenchy. But to capture the imagination of millennials, we wanted to create a dress where technology wasn’t just decoration, but integral to the creative process and the design itself. We partnered with haute couture fashion brand Marchesa to create a dress that thinks and learns – a dress that can understand and incorporate trends, interact with other people, and actually respond to feedback in real time by changing color.

First IBM Watson helped select the dress materials. We fed Watson with 40,000 material science blogs and online patent papers. Watson served up 35 material suggestions to fit the criteria set by the Marchesa designers.

Next, Watson suggested colors that would reflect fan sentiment. Watson ‘looked’ at past Marchesa dresses to learn the brand’s typical color palette. Drawing on learned correlations between colors and emotions, Watson suggested colors to represent five emotions: rose for ‘joy,’ coral for ‘passion,’ aqua for ‘excitement,’ butter for ‘encouragement,’ and lavender for ‘curiosity.’

Finally, Watson enabled the dress to respond to fan emotions as it walked the red carpet. On gala night, Watson detected different emotions among the hash tagged fashion fan tweets in real time; it triggered color changes in the LED lights embedded in the dress’ fabric flowers, turning fans into co-creators by reflecting their input in the dress itself.

IBM was the talk of the Gala. IBM not only outperformed the fashion stalwarts (like Prada by 2:1 mentions and Dolce & Gabbana by 5:1 mentions), but had a 75% share of social conversation amongst technology brands. IBM even outperformed the Gala’s official sponsor, Apple, by 5:1 mentions. The dress landed on numerous best dressed lists, including Harpers Bazaars’ and Elle’s.

We turned a tight paid media budget into $8 million of earned media. Two-thirds of this stemmed from the incredible amount of press coverage we earned, in media like WIRED, Fast Company, and Vogue. The other third of our $8m earned media came from social conversation, which was both loud (352 million impressions) and extremely positive (95% positive vs 77% for the Gala overall).

In the week of the Cognitive Dress, the number of true and validated customer leads jumped 95% vs. the previous week.