Beyond human creativity, what did the first New York AI Fashion Week bring?

Source: Cc Doctrine

In recent months, artificial intelligence generation technology has become more and more popular and widely explored within the fashion industry, and it has also promoted the ideas and creativity of many creative people. Just as the invention of photography in the 19th century did not kill painting but allowed painting to be born with technology, today, the emergence of AI technology is sweeping across digital media art and undergoing a quiet change. This time, it even took over the world of fashion design .

Not long ago, the first "AI Fashion Week" was held at Spring Studio, the annual fixed venue of New York Fashion Week, which gathered designers, technical experts and fashion industry leaders from all over the world to jointly explore the application of artificial intelligence in fashion design and manufacturing. Applications.

Rather than calling it a "Fashion Week," it's more about an "exhibition of works on artificial intelligence-led fashion design processes."

Different from traditional fashion shows, countless screens are set up in the open and bright venue, and the "show pictures" displayed on the screens are all created by designers using emerging AI software, whether it is from clothing fabrics, colors, models and show images. The field installations all look exactly like the real photos.

At the same time, this is also an unprecedented competition. The works of the contestants not only exist in the virtual world, but also will be judged by audience votes and a panel of industry experts. The final three winners will be judged by the e-commerce giant Revolve actually produced and sold.

More than 400 designers from all over the world participated in this fashion week. They were of various ages and backgrounds, many of whom had no training in fashion design or fashion industry practitioners.

But this does not affect the brilliance of AI works, including revolutionary all-digital fashion design, shoes and accessories manufactured using 3D printing technology, and smart fashion based on face recognition technology.

Around 70% of the designers opted to use the artificial intelligence image generator Midjourney to generate garments. They fed the generator as detailed and clear text prompts as possible to produce an image that not only described the garment itself and its surroundings and specific details, but also ensured multiple different but aesthetically consistent looks to build a complete collection .

For some of the participating designers, the competition was an opportunity to explore the threshold of entering the industry. Designer Dmitrii Rykunov, who works as a management consultancy, read clothing construction books for junior fashion designers and eventually took a garment-first approach to create a project titled Blooming Garden.

The collection is dreamy androgynous, with loose jackets and kimonos, baggy high-waisted trousers and sheer trench coats all embellished in floral prints, with soft suiting at the fore.

Rachel Koukal, a graphic designer, has worked in the fashion industry in the past, but she was disappointed by the industry's outdated attitudes and lack of diversity. She is blunt: "I've been using Midjourney and it allows me to create any body I want with my imagination, so I decided I wanted to create a collection that was inclusive of sizes and shapes."

The result was "Soft Apocalypse," which featured a motley collection of models, mostly curvaceous and voluptuous, in futuristic skinny silhouettes paired with jackets and trousers made from high-tech fabrics , to withstand severe weather.

Designer ARIA PHENIX visualized the wonderful feeling he experienced on the stunning beach of Ipanema at sunset, so a series of works called IPANEMA RESORT COLLECTION 2023 was born.

Mimicking the magical colors of a sunset, the collection is crafted in fluid cottons and embroidered lace that evokes the salty foam of the sea.

Fran, a 57-year-old civil rights attorney in New York, attended the event after teaching herself how to use Midjourney, an artificial intelligence image generator. Today, she is proficient in several artificial intelligence drawing software and has accumulated nearly 9,000 followers on Instagram.

Although the new skills have brought new opportunities to her life, she admitted that she has no plans to quit her job as a lawyer, and artificial intelligence drawing will become an important and interesting hobby in Fran's future life.

Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg among the many contestants, as the founder Cyril Foiret said: "It is much more efficient to use artificial intelligence to conceive 'extremely difficult and challenging' fashion works. I really want to give any application These tools provide opportunities for everyone to potentially become the big fashion designers of the future."

It is believed that with the continuous development of artificial intelligence technology, "AI Fashion Week" will continue to be the focus of attention and bring new opportunities and changes to the development of the fashion industry.