In the last 10 years the number of designers and fashion houses producing collections and capsules with recycled and upcycled materials has definitely increased, but now the practice of recycling may become a trend also in the digital world.
LG AI Research developed a while back an AI artist, designer and environmental activist, Tilda, that, in February debuted at New York Fashion Week on the "Flowers on Venus" runway collection created with Greedilous' designer YounHee Park.
Tilda specializes in illustration and pattern design, and employs EXAONE (LG's latest multi-modal AI model) as her brain to study from millions of learning data. The AI has also a special focus on environmental responsibility.
Since February Tilda's developers took the project further and, at the beginning of June, Tilda unveiled her first solo capsule collection of sustainably crafted clothing.
The "Digital Upcycling Project" consists in a collection of 30 garments created from discarded and repurposed materials, both physical and digital. Launched in the Metaverse on World Environment Day (June 5th, 2022), the collection is conceived as a way to raise awareness about digital and physical waste especially among younger generations.
Tilda combined in the collection digital and physical waste: when she worked on Greedilous' collection, the AI created more than 4,000 images, but only 13 were used in the final collection. The images that didn't make the runway were dumped as discarded data into the virtual landfill, turning into "digital waste" or stagnant, unused data.
Now, you can erase data you may not need, but, when you decide to store data for future projects, they can turn into a threat to the environment. The energy costs of storing digital waste contribute to carbon emission levels: according to the LG AI Research team, the carbon emissions of one office worker's annual emails equal the carbon emissions produced by a large vehicle traveling 200 miles.
For what regards physical waste, we all - more or less - know the impact physical waste is having on the planet with 92 million tons of fabric discarded globally as waste on an annual basis.
The LG AI Research team highlighted in a press release about the project that this is the equivalent of "one truckload of clothing thrown away every second". While urban landfills are bursting with waste, excess clothes are also being thrown in deserts and natural environments (and we're not even considering the hundreds of tons of water employed to produce a single ton of fabric) and, if we don't reverse this trend, numbers will rise to 130 million tons by 2030.
For the upcycled collection Tilda combined secondhand denim and fabrics with her own digital waste, patchworking fabrics and themes developed for the fashion week using the Japanese "Boro" technique, an age-old practice of reinforcing a textile using scraps of fabric that would have been thrown out.
The projects includes 13 classic denim jackets, 14 trousers, and 3 hats made with upcycling secondhand denim and fabrics and with reinterpreted images (used to create combinations of objects, colours and patterns) from Tilda's own digital waste. The complete collection was released globally last Sunday at Dupbytilda.com in a 3D, 360-degree view Metaverse store, where people can look at the collection and purchase it. Tilda also participated in the UN Environment Programme's (UNEP) World Environment Day initiative.
The idea behind this project is interesting as it pushes us to consider how much waste we are producing in the digital space. For example, each email sent and stored emits 4g of carbon, so a large email box can contribute to the energy problem.
You may argue that 4g is a tiny fraction, but, according to the LG AI Research group, if 2.3 billion internet users each deleted just ten emails, this would account for 1.7 million GB of energy saved on data archiving.
Despite digital recycling may sound a rather bizarre concept (why recycling when we can just delete things and save space and energy…), it is also true that quite often we tend to save things hoping to use them in future but never get around to doing it.
So, while Tilda’s collection may just be another project about digital fashion in the Metaverse, the interesting thing about it is that it prompts us to think about all the digital spaces we occupy with our work, thoughts, images and messages. Tilda tells us indeed that sustainability can be applied also to our digital environments on an everyday basis.
That said, despite the effort, the results aren't very convincing: the IRL items, especially the jackets and trousers, do not look particularly original, in fact they look less intriguing than other items made by other brands with recycled denims and fabrics using the boro technique. Besides, the allegedly recycled images in most cases seem to have been reused as palettes and moods rather than as starting points for the designs.
The prices - ranging from $1,260 for a hat, to $4,680 for the denim trousers - also seem to be a bit too high, so high that you may want to scream "waste not, want not". Sure, it's great that proceeds from the collection will be donated to support artists and creators using sustainable mediums or inspired by environmental topics. Yet fashion fans who are into the sustainability trend and who may be willing to spend a vast amount of money on clothes, may prefer buying clothes made with recycled or vegan materials by prominent fashion labels, rather than opting for overpriced designs created by an Artificial Intelligence.
So, for the time being, we can say thanks to Tilda for making us think about digital and physical waste. But next time she may have to come up with something a bit more extraordinary and affordable to wow us all. As an alternative, we may still recycled her. That would be a great way to show her we have learnt how to recycle digital waste.
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