The Coming Death of Commercial Costume Design

I think the last time I was personally involved in costuming of any kind was sometime around 1968, when I covered several cardboard boxes with aluminum foil and walked the neighborhood during Halloween as a “robot”.

Oh, no, that’s not true. I also did Halloween as Frank-n-Further from The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was in college. I don’t know why there aren’t any family pictures of me as the robot (maybe my parents were still trying to kill my interest in science fiction?), but there is one of me as Frank.

A good handful of days ago I wrote a piece on the death of “commercial” art at the hands of the new AI art programs. (Here is a link to the original version of that post — but I will also be publishing an updated version here on Medium in a bit.) The programs (using neural networks and “trained” by being exposed to tens of thousands of examples) have started to produce startlingly good output and artists are worried, as they ought to be. When a company can purchase or license software that can (presumably) serve all of their graphical art needs (from product packaging to hotel lobby decoration and everything between…), and can do so without all of those pesky human things like needing to eat or misunderstanding the commission, or insisting that creating art, even commercial art, takes some time.

The point of the word “commercial” is that cost is a primary concern. Reduced Cost and Reduced Time (because time=money). Business generally finds that human-centered things are…