Regardless of the fact that artificial intelligence is not so closely associated with the global clothing market, fashion cannot escape new technological trends. This is especially true since it is one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the world, with revenues expected to reach $2.25 trillion by 2025 according to Forbes. Brands and designers are therefore increasingly adopting the latest technology to keep pace with rapidly changing fashion demands.
Brands like Finery and StitchFix predict upcoming trends using machine learning. Platforms like Stylumia, TrueFit, or Virtusize help brands determine the desires of their customers, while virtual models showcase designers’ creations around the world. Four years ago, fashion photographer Cameron-James Wilson created the world’s first digital supermodel, the dark-skinned Shudu Gram, whom many did not believe was a computer-generated character. Wilson is now the CEO of the world’s first fully digital modeling agency, The Diigitals, while The Fabrikant creates clothing solely in the digital realm of 3-D fashion design. Dress-X allows users to purchase clothing for their digital persona on social media by selecting a personal image and desired clothing, paying for it, and receiving an image of themselves wearing that creation.
Artificial, artificial
Even the largest companies could not remain on the sidelines, as the American department store chain Macy’s launched its shopping assistant in 2016 to enhance the in-store customer experience, while the Chinese retail giant Alibaba has offered its FashonAI store since 2018, featuring smart mirrors and clothing tags with Bluetooth chips in every product. Additionally, Tommy Hilfiger, in collaboration with IBM, trains fashion designers in AI design skills through the Reimagine Retail project. Of course, Amazon also developed an algorithm for an artificial designer that designs by copying styles, as well as the fashion assistant Echo Look. MIT students Pinar Yanardag and Emily Salvador founded the first fashion brand Glitch in 2019, whose designs are powered by artificial intelligence, and the latest trend in fashion is the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are cryptographically secured digital assets on the blockchain. The virtual fashion brand RTFKT, established last year, sold a digital jacket as an NFT this March for over $125,000.
In Croatia, Silvio Vujičić, a fashion designer and artist, was the first to use artificial intelligence in fashion design. This idea emerged during a conversation between Vujičić and his architect friend Miro Roman about refreshing the fashion brand and incorporating an external perspective on the collections. To achieve a similar effect, Vujičić said, large companies typically hire a new person as an artistic director, while he digitized his own archive and created a new persona based on it: A. I. Soll, co-authored by Roman. This allowed Vujičić to work with his own ‘DNA’, to ‘clone’ it, but also to pair it with other ‘genetic structures’.
– The outcome is unpredictable and very exciting, fast and cheap, yet conceptually strong and attractive. I would emphasize that Soll is still growing and learning, developing with the increase of the archive. This is a continuous process, so it will be interesting to follow it. As a studio, we will embark on the physical realization of Soll’s collections during 2022, and this will be the first fashion in history designed by an AI designer – announced Vujičić.
Omnipotent Soll
Although the use of artificial intelligence in the fashion industry, at least the creative one used by Vujičić, is still quite unknown, within his brand E.A. 1/1 S.V., he uses it, he says, as a kind of creative instrument for predicting atmospheres, silhouettes, and textures. He describes how he creates interesting visual data – silhouettes that then need to be reinterpreted within production possibilities. He notes that this is where the space for experimentation opens up, which any biological designer would find difficult to initiate without such visual input.
– Questions arise such as: what is the clothing made of, what are the methods of making patterns, how is the pattern joined: is it welded or sewn, and is it even tailored clothing? Keeping this in mind, I am deeply convinced that AI designers will bring the much-needed refreshment to the fashion industry, considering that it is still predominantly dealing with outdated paradigms of technological production problems that date back to the 19th century. There are, in fact, two completely different types of artificial intelligence used in the fashion industry. On one hand, we talk about AI technology used in the context of improving business, and on the other hand, there is AI whose function is much more complex as it takes on the role of a creative director or even the designer themselves. Soll, the AI I use, belongs to that creative category. Soll is simultaneously a fashion designer, artificial intelligence, a sub-brand of E.A. 1/1 S.V., a search engine, and a cloud of images. The principle by which it creates is a combination of information it receives from the database where my entire previous opus of over 300,000 photographs is stored, as well as combining textual references from works or films that have marked my design habitus, based on which its authentic concept arises, devoid of gender specificity since Soll, in its searches and reflections on my collections, disregards the gender of the models who wore certain designs. This means that Soll, by insight into my previous work as well as the intellectual and cultural context in which it arises, opens up a completely new perspective on issues already inscribed in my work, and with further development, it will become even more independent in the breadth and scope of its creative and production capabilities – explains Vujičić.
