Four firms have published a size for the same market: artificial intelligence in apparel. Their figures for the middle of the next decade run from $4.79 billion to $89.41 billion, a spread of 18.7 times. Each of the four sells the report its number came from. One of them reached our Korean-language feed this year, filed as industry news.

Research Nester puts the market at $2.92 billion in 2025 and $89.41 billion by 2035, which takes better than 40.8% growth every year for ten years running. The report does not discover that rate. It starts from it.

The same market is worth $0.97 billion in 2026 to Business Research Insights, reaching $4.79 billion by 2035 at 19.39%. The firm publishes its page in Korean with the figures unchanged, 9억 7천만 달러, so the number arrives in a Seoul feed as news rather than as a listing.

The four disagree about 2026 by a factor of four, and 2026 is not a forecast.

Straits Research shows how a base year is made. Its page reports $2.77 billion for 2025 and $3.86 billion for 2026, and the second is the first multiplied by the forecast rate of 39.43%, to two decimal places. An earlier release ran the identical rate off a 2024 figure of $1.99 billion. Nobody measured this year. It was multiplied.

The highest rate of the four, 41.39%, belongs to Fortune Business Insights, and it still lands below Straits, at $40.81 billion in 2034. It begins at $2.56 billion rather than $3.86 billion. The growth rate is decoration; the base year does the work.

Seeing the workings costs money. Research and Markets lists The Business Research Company’s AI-in-fashion report at $4,490 for a single reader and $8,490 for a company, with a free sample offered first. That report’s own 2026 figure, $2.47 billion, agrees with none of the four. The press release is not the finding. It is the shop window.

IPVM, which examined this trade in its own sector, found firms with American letterheads operating from residential addresses and charging a minimum of $2,500 a copy. Research Nester was among those it named.

Forty per cent is now the received rate in apparel technology, repeated in vendor material without its base. A studio selling AI design tools opens its investment case with two market sizes it attributes to two other research houses, then arrives at its own platform. Neither of those figures matches any of the four above.

No statistical office measures AI in apparel. A board asking how large the opportunity is therefore has only the answers that are for sale, written by people whose revenue depends on the question being asked again next spring.

Anyone can produce the 2027 figure tonight with a calculator. What the invoice buys is the confidence to cite it.