AI 'no substitute' for fashion designers' creativity

HONG KONG

AI is transforming the fashion world but the fast growing technology will never be a replacement for designers' "original creativity," according to the head of a pioneering project.

Fashion innovator Calvin Wong has developed the Interactive Design Assistant for Fashion (AiDA), the world's first designer-led AI system.

It uses image-recognition technology to speed up the time it takes for a design to go from a first sketch to the catwalk.

"Designers have their fabric prints, patterns, colour tones, initial sketches and they upload the images," Wong told AFP. "Then our AI system can recognize those design elements and come up with more proposals for designers to refine and modify their original design."

Wong said AiDA's particular strength was its ability to present "all the possible combinations" for a designer to consider, something he said was impossible in the current design process.

An exhibition at Hong Kong's M+ Museum in December featured collections by 14 designers developed using the tool. But Wong stressed it was about "facilitating designers inspiration" not "using AI to take over a designers job, to take over their creativity."

Wong heads up the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design (AidLab), a collaboration between Britain's Royal College of Art (RCA) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he is a professor in fashion.

AiDA was just one of the AidLab projects being showcased in the British capital ahead of London Fashion Week. Others included the Neo Couture project which aims to use advanced technologies to digitally preserve the specialized skills and techniques used by couturiers.

The future of AI in fashion design, however, is not clear cut.

New York brand Collina Strada's founder Hillary Taymour this week admitted that she and her team used AI image generator Midjourney to create the collection they showed at New York Fashion Week.

Although Taymour only used images of the brand's own past looks to help generate its Spring/Summer 2024 collection, looming legal issues could keep AI-generated clothes off the catwalks for now.