You’ve heard of Metaverse Fashion Week, New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, and more. Now we are pleased to report that there is another fashion week to watch.
Brought to you by AI creative studio Maison Meta, AI Fashion Week — powered by e-commerce platform Revolve Group — debuted April 20 in New York City. Maison Meta is responsible for the first AI-generated collection and ad campaign for Moncler Genius, as well as the AI-generated campaigns for Pangaia and other global brands.
The event, which lasted two days and attracted more than 1,000 visitors, featured collections created by 30 AI designers chosen from 350 entries of 15 to 30 looks each.
The competition
Each applicant had one month to curate 15-30 images depicting their collection and show environment, with the option to highlight accessories and moments off the catwalk, such as backstage and street fashion images. Eligible collections went through the AI Fashion Week app, with two rounds of voting. In the first round, the general public voted to limit entries to just ten final collections. All collections are designed digitally without physical prototypes according to competition guidelines.
A jury made up of fashion industry icons such as Dame Pat McGrath, celebrated make-up artist Michael Mente, Revolve co-founder and CEO Natalie Hazzout, Céline casting director Tiffany Godoy, VogueJapan head of editorial content Alexander Gilkes, co-founder of SquaredCircles and British Vogue contributing editors, among others, will announce the top three winners in May.
The winners will be part of the first cohort of the first AI Fashion Tech incubator developed in collaboration between Maison Meta and Revolve. In addition, they can create their brand, design and produce their physical collection for sale on Revolve and Fwrd.
“There’s a lot of hype around generative AI, and a lot of that comes from people typing away at Midjourney,” said Nima Abbasi, a partner in Maison Meta. “We tried to do that, but we didn’t get the images we wanted. The quality of the output and final image you need from settings to conditions cannot currently come from one tool.”
“At Maison Meta we have created our own custom workflow that resides in various AI tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion with custom models, plus Deform, Wrap Fusion, EbSynth, ControlNet, StyleGan3, TouchDesigner and Notch with which we create the quality that we produce with ultimate control over the final output.”
While the vast majority of fashion students are women, men still dominate the industry. Abbasi now shared with NFT that 70 percent of the 350 designers who signed up for the incubator are women, ranging in age from 16 to 68, all from different backgrounds and nationalities.
Since the show opened in New York, more than 4,000 people have registered on the app to view and vote for eligible collections. We watch with bated breath whether the arrival of digital fashion and now AI fashion accelerates the democratization of the fashion industry.
