Acne Studios x Robbie Barrat
Artificial Intelligence hits the runway at Paris Fashion Week 2020.
In collaboration with artist Robbie Barrat, fashion house Acne Studios explored the possibilities of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its Men’s Fall/Winter 2020 collection.
Thousands of looks from the Acne archives were fed into software by Barrat; Acne creative director Jonny Johansson and his team then created the final looks inspired by the AI renderings.
Acne Studios collaboration with Robbie Barrat. Black and white AI renders inspiring the Men’s Fall Winter 2020 collection. Photo credit: Joelle Diderich (via Instagram @jdiderich)
“Traditionally if you think about programming you think about a programmer coding rules into the computer, but neural networks are the opposite,” explained Barrat. “The neural network will just look at a bunch of data and then figure out the rules. If a neural network looks at a ton of landscape paintings, it’ll figure out typically there’s ground and grass on the bottom, there are trees in the middle.”
In the case of Acne’s designs, Barrat’s neural networks were programmed *not* to learn by the correct rules.
Acne Studios Men’s Fall Winter 2020 collection in collaboration with Robbie Barrat.
In turn, the AI outputs inspired unconventional designs on the Acne runway. For instance, several coats in the collection had a curved opening at the bottom front: a direct result of the algorithm being confused about borders in clothing.
“It is amazing to see that artificial intelligence can be freeing as a creative tool,” Johansson stated in a press release. “I wanted the collection to be alive with new possibilities for how we wear clothes, while also being grounded in strange reality.”
Prior to the Acne collaboration, Barrat created a collection of AI designs for Balenciaga as a personal project in 2018. The outputs were weird and wonderful.
Barrat similarly extracted images from Balenciaga’s fashion campaigns, lookbooks, and runway shows. “The network has been able to come up with some really strange results and some weird outfits that you would never see in Balenciaga’s actual catalog,” stated Barrat. “In one case, the network generated a pair of pants with a red wrap-around thing on the side, almost like a shin bag, because it misinterpreted people holding actual bags next to their legs and thought that the bags were connected to their shins. I’m actually working with another artist and a Chinese bootleg factory to get some of these outfits produced in real life.”
AI Balenciaga project by Robbie Barrat, 2018.
Barrat’s clever work on the AI Balenciaga project was praised by Fast Company in an article entitled, “This AI designs Balenciaga better than Balenciaga” by Katherine Schwab in 2018.
“Because it’s not constrained by human taste, style, and history, the AI comes up with designs that may never occur to a person,” wrote Schwab. This was evident with the shin bags in the 2018 Balenciaga project and the curved coat cutaways on the Acne 2020 runway.
Barrat attributes the strange outputs partly due to the fact that the AI only has visual information to work with. “When humans are designing clothing, we know all about the non-visual context our clothes have (like what bags are used for and why people carry them, why people wear coats, etc.),” explained Barrat in a 2018 interview with fashion magazine Flaunt. “The network really doesn’t understand or care about this stuff, so instead of a bag it might instead just generate a piece of cloth for the person to hold—or just generate a pair of pants with a big compartment built in because it doesn’t understand that bags are separate from pants, since in all the images it sees they’re always right next to each other. It also doesn’t understand symmetry at all, but I really love the asymmetrical outfits. It’s just, like, a totally alien perspective.”
AI Balenciaga project looks by Robbie Barrat, 2018.
Barrat sees AI not as a replacement for creativity, but as a powerful resource to help augment it. “I don’t think that clothing designers need to worry about this sort of thing, but I do see a future where artists and designers use AI tools like this to augment human creativity,” he told Flaunt in 2018. “So maybe a designer could use the fashion neural network by generating outfits and flicking through them, hoping to find something interesting, and incorporate features of what they see from the AI in a human-made design. It’ll be a completely radical artist’s tool—not something that is going to replace artists.”
Enter Acne Men’s Fall/Winter 2020 collection.
And AI beauty could be next. Perhaps we’ll see AI inspired makeup on the runway at Paris Fashion Week 2021. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see a Beauty GAN inspired YouTube tutorial and AR face filter sometime soon.
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