So the good news is that on the evidence of this highly original Acne menswear collection, clothes design is not a human profession under threat from from AI anytime soon. The schtick was this: Jonny Johansson showed simultaneous fall 2020 women’s and menswear collections in a room beneath the Louvre. Although both collections were in the same space, a big, white wall split the runway so the showings were divided. My esteemed colleague and Louvre expert Amy Verner watched from the women’s side while I watched the men’s.
Before the show(s), we did at least get the chance to gang up on Johansson and grill him on what seemed initially a pretentious gimmick as we ate all his backstage fruit. He explained that really, these shows are not the end product of the season, but mid-stage in a process that will see them combined in some project at a later date. The collections had been divided for reasons not entirely clear, but Johansson spoke ominously about a sense of shift on the horizon and an instinct to anticipate it somehow. He said: “We don’t know what’s coming next, we just know that something is coming.”
Okay. So each side got a different treatment, and during the show(s) I could catch just a glimpse of the women’s offering via a gently moving mirrored ceiling that sometimes was at the right angle to show the top of the female models. They seemed to be wearing a lot of messed-up long velvet gowns.
Over in the men’s half of the room was a collection that had been created in collaboration with a “generative artist” named Robbie Barrat, who writes algorithms to realize his projects. As far as I could tell Johansson had sanctioned the processing of all of Acne’s archives through Barrat’s algorithms to enable an AI-authored menswear collection. There was, I’m sure, plenty of artistic license left here, but running with the idea that this was a tech-authored collection, it was fun to consider whether this was the beginning of fashion Skynet.
On the evidence of the first look, especially and much of the first section in general, AI is really, really poor at clothing design—unless its design is to embarrass man to death, in which case it is quite brilliant. The high white-and-tight pants and split-to-the-navel white meshed shirt of that first look were accessorized with a bag that carried as many compelling ideas as this lineup promised to present. With time, however, this collection warmed up a little. Perhaps the shocking start was just a glitch. There was a great Klein blue puffer jacket and some amusing miniaturized pool-toy accessories. A snake-print suit was not the worst of its kind. There were various distressed-knit tabard-y things of the type digested here before. The collection slowly learned from the lessons of past behavior and became pretty consistent with the Acne aesthetic—not surprising if you consider it was a math-crunched amalgam of all previous Acne Studio collections. This show felt like a conceit that had a tangible foundation but whose execution was considerably flawed. However, I’m certain that an AI Acne Studios–commissioned fashion show review algorithm (or indeed guest influencer) would say something very different.
