AI AI AI - TL;DR Driving Consumer Lust is a Very Human Skill
AI
It’s the acronym we all hear most these days, from news sources as disparate as the Financial Times (expected) to Amy Odell’s Back Row ( less expected), the latter of which tipped me off to the designer Paatif, who won Meta Maison’s AI fashion week last year.
From the newsletter - “José Sobral was working as an architect when he used AI to design a fashion collection, which he entered into Maison Meta’s AI Fashion Week… Sobral, who lives in Portugal, won the first competition, and got to spend two months in Los Angeles working with the team at Revolve, which made and sold his collection under the brand Paatiff. In a month, he’s showing another collection he designed with AI at Lisbon Fashion Week.”
For many of the big maisons, I’m looking at you, Pharrell at LV, the path to becoming creative director is no longer growing your couturier skills amongst the petits mains in the atelier but an ability to tap the zeitgeist and drive the TikTok/Insta viewers to maniacal heights of consumer lust. This is not a dig at Pharrell, just the truth laid bare. I actually love Pharrell for LV. But even designers who did start their craft as tailors and sewers and sketchers need to be able to harness these new “marketing zeitgeist TikTok buzzword” skills to remain relevant, so perhaps we should admit that these media-frenzy-driving abilities are THE skill now for apparel/accessories sales.
If we take that as fact, then AI-driven design is an absolute given. Those with a flair for what people will want will be able to surface their designs and creative vision without the technical requirements that might have held them back. I’m into it.
One big BUT, for now, according to another Meta Maison story, there’s still a significant missing link in AI fashion design, namely taking designs from the purely visual to the pattern design required to bring creations to life, particularly at scale. Watch this space. (unless you already are watching this space, then send any companies solving this my way, thanks!)
The designer Paatif is an excellent example of why AI is not scary. Being a great designer isn’t about any singular ability. It’s a combination of skills: knowing your customer, technical pattern and sewing skills, an understanding of textiles, a way with color or silhouette that is pleasing, a merchant’s eye for sellability, and a penchant for marketing flourishes. Not to mention, even with stunning AI designs, you can still imagine the requirements for an entire team of people to make a selection of ideas a commercially viable reality, sized, merchandised, and assorted for different markets and campaigns. AI is a shift change but not a decimation of creative work.
I’m convinced that taste-making is a skill that can’t be faked by AI. AI can expand the pool of people with some of the other required skills, giving them an easier time of bringing their ideas out of their minds' eye and into reality. That genesis, though, that true zeitgeist capturing ability, I think we’re light years away from the amalgamation of human ideas being fed into a model and spit out as generative AI will make that lightning in a bottle any easier.
I welcome a world where innovations like this force us to consider what skills we are really looking for in a fashion designer, what part of the underlying creation process is necessary to break the mold and make a consumer take notice. I don’t know if I’ll love the answer to this question, but as a marketer, I know we’ll be looking to recreate that genie in a bottle magic in a scalable way across all brands and platforms, regardless of how the product was designed.