AI Cannot Replace Fashion Designers’ Creative Talent

The head of a groundbreaking project believes that while AI is revolutionizing the fashion industry, it can never fully substitute the “unique creativity” of designers.

Fashion innovator Calvin Wong has developed the Interactive Design Assistant for Fashion (AiDA) – the world’s first designer-driven artificial intelligence system.

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

“The designers have their fabric prints, patterns, color tones, preliminary sketches and upload the images,” Wong told AFP.

“Our AI system then recognizes these design elements and provides designers with additional suggestions to refine and modify their original design.”

Wong said AiDA’s particular strength was its ability to present “all possible combinations” for a designer to consider, which he said was impossible in the current design process.

An exhibition at Hong Kong’s M Museum in December showcased the collections of 14 designers developed with the tool.

But Wong stressed that it was about “facilitating inspiration for designers” and not “using AI to take over the designer’s work, to take over their creativity”.

“We have to appreciate the original creativity of the designer,” he added.

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

– “Transformative”

RCA vice-chancellor Naren Barfield predicted the impact of artificial intelligence on the fashion industry would be “transformational”.

“The impact will be huge from the ideation and design stage to prototyping, all the way to manufacturing, distribution and finally recycling,” he said.

So-called personalization is already used to improve the customer experience with better product recommendations and more efficient searches, which helps buyers find what they want quickly and easily.

But as technology develops, highly specialized tools are also developed.

AiDA was just one of the AidLab projects presented in the British capital ahead of London Fashion Week, which started on Friday.

Others included the Neo Couture project, which aims to use advanced technologies to digitally preserve the specialized skills and techniques used by couturiers.

Faced with a skills shortage, the UK clothing industry is creating an AI-assisted training system to help teach couture skills.

Another project aims to increase sustainability to reduce the estimated 92 million tons of clothing that end up in landfills each year.

One possible use of the AI Loupe project is to help designers overcome the problems of using so-called dead fabric.

Designers can photograph the leftover fabric and then use the tool to get the missing details to assess its suitability for the design.

“It uses the camera as an index, the material is a QR code that brings information,” said Chipp Jansen, a researcher on the project.

– Maintain control –

However, the future of artificial intelligence in fashion design is not clear.

Hillary Taymour, founder of New York brand Collina Strada, admitted this week 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 from the brand’s own past to create his Spring/Summer 2024 collection, looming legal issues may keep AI-created clothes off the catwalks for the time being.

“When it comes to AI-designed fashion, I expect to hear from designers that there are intellectual property issues,” said Rebecca Lewin, senior curator at London’s Design Museum.

“Because everything that comes back is scraped from published images, and it takes a lot of work to regulate that.”

RCA’s Barfield said the area would be tricky, but he expected it would be resolved through test cases and legislation.

“I don’t know how fast AI is going to make a difference, but if it gives companies a competitive advantage, I think they will invest and adopt it quickly,” he said.

The only thing currently holding companies back was “massive investment” in infrastructure, he said.

“But once they’ve done that, they can take the step, they save material waste and productivity,” he added.

As for the designers’ fear that it could become a substitute for the human creative process, he said the key was who was driving the decision-making.

Using a “genetic algorithm,” where you started with a single design and used software to create successive designs, the computer could produce 1,000 varying looks that could take weeks to draw, he said.

On the other hand, if the designer retained control, AI could provide huge benefits by speeding up the process enormously “without necessarily making the decisions for them,” he added.