On the first sunny New York City day, a brightly lit room displays futuristic fabrics on silver screens. Alien-like humans wear obscure clothing on glossy white artificial runways; A completely digital fashion event with no physical designs or designers. There is a strict juxtaposition between the perfect clear blue sky and the dystopian dresses, with not a single identifiable material or fabric.
Last month, “AI Fashion Week” (Powered by Revolve) occurred in a remote Soho warehouse covered in glass windows. The various looks were shown on dimly lit screens (due to sunlight), and attendees squinted in awe and confusion at the futuristic designs. The “designers” made the collections by inserting prompts into an AI image generator. The event was part one of a competition where the winning designer gets their entire collection produced and sold by fast-fashion distributor Revolve. As the first large-scale AI fashion event, it pulls fashion professionals into a deeper discussion on the outlook of the future of AI in the fashion industry.
Artificial Intelligence is on an incredible rise, inserting itself into all points of media, such as fashion, music, film, and literature. Though controversial, the AI industry has a projected increase of 13x over the next seven years, and over 83% of companies have already claimed that AI is a priority in their business plans. With a 136 billion dollar market value, AI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and will only increase the productivity and efficiency of any task. (Data courtesy of Exploding Topics.)
One of the main fears of the public is that AI will take away jobs, thanks to its highly efficient and cheap labor. Specifically in the fashion industry, there are already clothing factories entirely powered by AI beginning to be implemented over the traditional manual labor sweatshops. The “DexNet 2.0” is a new robot grasping system heading for sweatshops, and it is projected that these robots will begin mass unemployment. Though sweatshops are not an ethical or healthy work environment for anyone, in Asia and Central and South America, these positions are among some of the only jobs available, barely providing families with liveable wages. Not only are the robots cheaper than paying full sweatshops of actual humans, but they also can work day and night with no breaks making clothing manufacturing faster than ever. In an already oversaturated planet crawling with discarded clothing in every ocean and landfill, the DexNet 2.0 forces the question of if this problem will only get worse as the fashion industry strives for “sustainability.” The photo below is located on the beaches of Ghana, covered in fast-fashion products.
Another aspect of AI fashion falls on the creative side of design and concept development. In an entirely new process of designing, rather than drawing and sketching out looks, designers develop “trigger words” inserted into the prompt section of the image generator. These words and phrases can be anything from “bubble” and “flowy” to actual designer names, generating similar designs based on their collections in the past. Before AI fashion week, there was a trend on Tiktok where creators would actually “breed” designer names together in the prompt section (ex: Vivienne Westwood x John Galliano.) The image produced is a cross between the two designers, perhaps a Galliano newspaper print Vivienne silhouette corset. However, AI designers are not required to list the prompts for each collection and look. This brings up the issue of Trade Dress and the intellectual property of designers and brands, which is already an issue in the fashion industry without AI involvement. With a new way of untraceable plagiarizing ideas and designs, new designers can skip concept development and pull directly from their inspirations by mixing and matching.
The future of AI and its place in the fashion industry remains undefined due to its new monthly advancements. It’s important to note that AI doesn’t only affect luxury and couture fashion but also highly accessible fast fashion, only making it even more accessible and oversaturated. In what may be a step backward for sustainability and also what can be a pivotal attributor to the job crisis, AI struggles to find a feasible place in the ever-changing fashion industry without taking creativity away from others. AI fashion shines a light on coded images and may fizzle out, similar to the NFT trend of 2022.
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