Generative Fashion: What the What? And Why oh Why?
New technologies — computational algorithms, AI, blockchain — allow us to produce one-of-one fashion at scale, fundamentally changing the way what we wear is ideated, designed, distributed, and consumed. Welcome to Neo-Couture.
The Fashion Environment: Wasteful Homogeneity
There’s a wide range of approaches to fashion today — the couture of Prada and Chanel; the fast fashion of Zara and H&M; the casual wear of The Gap and Uniqlo; the disposable attire of Shien and Cider. And yet, for all their differences, they follow the same basic blueprint: one design to manufacture thousands of identical garments.
At first glance, you may think: how else are you gonna do it — at least at scale? But such is the way of paradigms: we become thoroughly enmeshed that we assume it’s just the way things are. The great media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, referred to paradigms that mask themselves as natural or inevitable, as an environment.
This fashion environment is as inefficient as it is detrimental to, well, the environment. For example, 92 million tons of clothes are dumped in landfills every year. With the rise of fast fashion, that number is expected to reach 134 million tons by 2030 (data source). Why so much? Because manufacturers don’t know how much of any given garment is going to sell so they produce far too much and simply throw away whatever’s not been sold.
There are movements and companies trying to hedge this waste. Waste Yarn Project, who recently partnered with Tribute Brand on the Odds project to turn Chromie Squiggles into sweaters, “repurposes surplus yarns to create one-of-a-kind knitwear.”
But waste is only one byproduct of this approach to fashion. An equally distressing issue is homogeneity. As companies produce tens of thousands of identical garments, the world starts to look more and more alike. What’s so frustrating about this is that what we wear is the most readily available and visible way to express our individuality — and yet the fashion industry is built on producing identical items.
The question, then, is: How can we produce clothes that allow for self-expression while avoiding tremendous waste? Art, McLuhan argued, is the practice of exposing environments, of showing how that which we deem natural is in fact contrived. Perhaps, therefore, it’s to art that we should look for a way out of this environment — and into a new one.
What is Generative Art?
The “generative” in generative art refers to the inclusion of an autonomous system that incorporates an element of chance to create the final product. So rather than having one superstar artist working from the depths of his or her genius, the item is created in conjunction with an independent process, usually some kind of algorithm. But this autonomous system need not be computational. Take John Cage’s legendary music piece, 4’33”: the pianist plays nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, leaving the piece to be composed by the ambient sounds of the audience on any given night.
No doubt, some version of generative art has been around for ages. Indeed, archaeologists discovered 70,000 year old stone carvings that relied on a grid system. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that generative art became more widely adopted.
The Surrealists, for example, introduced the “game” of Exquisite Corpse in which a piece of paper is folded into three parts — one person draws a head, folds the paper so no one can see before handing it to a second person to draw the body who, in turn, folds the paper before handing it to a third person. The final result is nothing that any one artist controlled or could have even predicted.
The writer, William Burroughs, devised a process with his friend, the artist Brion Gysin, that they dubbed the cut-up technique. Burroughs would take pieces of his own writing, snippets from the newspaper, maybe some Shakespeare, and literally cut them up, put them in a hat, then “write” his novels by pulling fragments (more often, Burroughs used a folding technique but it’s the same principle). When he started painting, Burroughs would place cans of paint in front of a canvas and, armed with a shotgun, shoot the cans, spraying their paint onto the canvas. Shotgun art, he rather appropriately called it. (Niki de Saint Phalle used a similar approach she dubbed the Pop Gun method.)
Generative art has seen a veritable explosion in recent years thanks to technological advances — and, perhaps most importantly, to the creation of generative platforms such as Art Blocks and its Art Blocks Engine. JMY’s Mycelia collection, for instance, features the emergent networks of…mycelia. JMY programmed his algorithm to mimic mycelia as they encounter ever shifting circumstances — nutrients of various sorts, collisions of networks, survival instincts.
Generative Fashion, Web3, & The Rise of Individuality
As Elizabeth Bigger writes of generative fashion, “The complexities of textiles, geometries and fit, the unending equations of how to express self within space, allows for the computational nature of digital fashion to have unending possibilities for metaversal expression.” Indeed, we’re on the verge of an explosion of virtual fashion thanks to generative AI.
But applying the same principles and practices to physical fashion, we introduce a fundamental shift in how IRL apparel is ideated, designed, distributed, and consumed. Think of a single designer having to create thousands and thousands of unique garments. It’s as absurd as it is impossible. But with some clever code, keen curation, and some clicks of a mouse, a “designer” can generate thousands of one-of-a-kind garments. We call it Neo-Couture.
Suddenly, people can buy and wear items no one else in the world will ever have. Rather than all of us choosing from the same racks of clothes, we each get to adorn ourselves as individuals. And, thanks to the transparency and immutability of the blockchain, the singular provenance of every item is provable. Our clothes become PFPs — profile pictures — IRL.
This continues the overall market trend towards end-user empowerment — a movement that, in many ways, began with the likes of Yelp. Rather than brands crafting clothes from the opacity of a black box, generative fashion can let the wearer participate in the creation of their clothes. We see a version of this with Nike By You which lets people customize the colors and, to some extent, the materials of their shoes. Of course, that’s not generative design but it signals the movement towards consumer participation in brands and products.
There’s actually a name for this new paradigm. It’s called Web3.
Decentralized Fashion
Today, apparel companies operate top-down, generally from a single node — the designer and their corporation — that then bestows its goods on the public. High fashion brands, in particular, tend to rely on a single star such as Tom Ford or Karl Lagerfeld. But, with generative fashion, the very architecture of fashion brands is recast.
While the taste and creativity of a “designer” remain critical, their terms shift. The designer, once central, becomes a component within a distributed network that includes an algorithm. Code and chance become key collaborators. Rather than having to design every item, the generative designer is more of a curator, choosing inputs such as patterns, palette, and materials while the algorithm does the work of “designing.”
This frees fashion houses from dependence on a single, and often in-high-demand, designer. At the same time, this opens the field to a wide range of creative voices. As the demands of the position move away from technical training — years of fashion school and apprenticeships — a breadth of artists, architects, graphic designers, and musicians are suddenly able to become “fashion designers.” We’re seeing this already as musicians and athletes are entering the fashion field in droves. The mmERCH genesis drop, for example, is a collaboration between a historian of art, architecture, and fashion (Colby “Minnie Muse” Mulgrabi) and a legendary comic book artist (Gilbert Hernandez). As AI becomes an essential component of fashion, I imagine we’ll see writers and art historians — those gifted with words and a well versed visual diet — become central figures in what we wear.
This generative fashion designer — if “designer” is still the right word — must be part coder, too. That doesn’t mean they have to be able to write code from scratch. But it does involve the skills and mindset of an audience never associated with fashion: computer engineers and mathematicians. This new kind of designer will not just know of silhouettes but of rarity scores, too.
And as the rarefied air of the studio is replaced by accessible tech platforms such as the Art Blocks Engine, anyone anywhere will be able to try their hand at crafting their own wear — or even creating a fashion brand.
As generative design recasts the very functioning of a fashion company, we ask: what makes a fashion brand in the world of Web3? What does a heritage house of the future look like?
Fashion 3.0
While no one knows quite what the metaverse means, the reality is we’re already living there. We work, date, play, read, learn, converse, and shop online. Our lives are an everyday hybrid of material and code, things and screens. As we move more and more fluidly between the virtual and the physical, the needs of our clothing change. Fashion, it seems safe to say, will begin to adjust to the wearer’s environment, empowering people to express themselves as they move between the digital and IRL.
No doubt, the biggest challenge to generative fashion is manufacturing. Today’s factories are optimized to produce one-to-many — one design to thousands of products. But with some clever hacks and new facilities such as distributed micro factories, we will soon be able to create one-of-one fashion at scale, eliminating the tremendous waste of the industry. And all while fostering personal expression and proliferating difference, making the world a little more interesting.
Mind you, none of this is to disdain traditional fashion. Far from it. It is only to note that technology shapes our world, for better and worse — and generative design is radically recasting not just fashion but all manufactured goods (not to mention art, of course). We see generative fashion not as replacing traditional fashion but as superseding it — bringing that long, beautiful heritage into the new fashion environment. As new tools create new possibilities, the very frame of fashion — how we think about it, make it, wear it — is radically changing.
mmERCH is Neo-Couture. We code, cut, and curate luxury apparel where every piece is 1-of-1-of-x, linking art and fashion across the digital, physical, and virtual. The Juice Box is where we discuss the history, future, and philosophy of Neo-Couture. Visit mmERCH >
