Fashion MNIST is intended as a drop-in replacement for the classic MNIST dataset—often used as the "Hello, World" of machine learning programs for computer vision. The MNIST dataset contains images of handwritten digits (0, 1, 2, etc.) in a format identical to that of the articles of clothing you'll use here.
This guide uses Fashion MNIST for variety, and because it's a slightly more challenging problem than regular MNIST. Both datasets are relatively small and are used to verify that an algorithm works as expected. They're good starting points to test and debug code.
Here, 60,000 images are used to train the network and 10,000 images to evaluate how accurately the network learned to classify images. You can access the Fashion MNIST directly from TensorFlow. Import and load the Fashion MNIST data directly from TensorFlow: