Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law & Technology

A Prada-giorno to You: Can Artificial Intelligence Tell Funny Fashion Jokes and Draw Caricatures?

Many of us have been trying to push AI text tools to the limits to discover their potential: crochet artists tried to break ChatGPT with their ugly-cute amigurumi patterns; other users tried instead to circumvent the blocks that make sure the chatbot doesn't say anything inappropriate. Reddit users, for example, prompted ChatGPT to adopt a fictional persona - Dan (short for Do Anything Now).  

By doing so they bypassed the system's moderation rules placed by OpenAI, the research company behind ChatGPT, and convinced it to provide texts without censorship (but OpenAI patched the error pretty quickly). One interesting definition for this (that may become handy this year when we talk about AI) was provided by the website LessWrong that coined a term for promptint a large-language model like ChatGPT to misbehave - the "Waluigi effect". In the world of Nintendo games, Waluigi is the evil version of Luigi from the Super Mario saga.

But what else can ChatGPT do? Would it be a cool stand-up comedian, for example, and does it know how to tell jokes? Let's see.

Requested to provide a few simple jokes, the system complied and came up with something pretty basic: "Why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing!" or "Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field!"

Things became a bit more difficult when the system was requested to provide jokes about fashion weeks in general and influencers. The chatbot came up with "Why did the fashion designer refuse to attend the fashion week in Milan? Because they were feeling runway!" and "Why did the fashion influencer cross the road? To get to the other side of the street style!"

While the attempt at playing with words wasn't that convincing (feeling rundown/feeling runway), it remains remarkable anyway the fact that the system made a correct reference to the fashion week in Milan, one of the fashion capitals, and also provided a joke about a "fashion influencer" when it was just requested to provide a joke about influencers in general (so it may have picked also a beauty influencer).

Requested to provide a joke about the fashion industry in general, ChatGPT continued with the same "Why did so and so" formula but provided a funny joke – "Why did the fashion designer refuse to work with denim? Because they thought it was too blue-collar for their brand!" and one joke that again attempted a pun on words (books/looks) that didn't seem extremely funny, "Why did the fashion model go to the library? Because they wanted to check out some new looks!"

Things became more complicated when requested to write a joke about a contemporary designer: first it mentioned Virgil Abloh, but, alerted to the fact that the designer had passed away, the AI system politely apologised for any offense caused.

Asked to provide a joke about a living contemporary designer, it opted for Demna Gvasalia, but again the joke didn't make any sense. "Why did Demna Gvasalia refuse to design a collection for dogs?" the chatbot wondered, "Because he only designs for Vetements!"

Told that it wasn't funny, the system offered to try again and moved onto another designer: "Why did Donatella Versace refuse to design a collection for giraffes?" it asked "Because their necks are already long enough, they don't need any more Versace!"

Rebuked for not knowing much about fashion, the AI system apologized and highlighted that it doesn't have emotions and personal experiences, but it can go through a vast amount of information, reminding us that humour is subjective.

In the next step we asked the chatbot to come up with a joke about Miuccia Prada, someone prominent and very famous to make things easy. ChatGPT complied with two jokes, "Why did Miuccia Prada refuse to design a collection inspired by fruit? Because she didn't want to be known as the 'Prada Pineapple!" and "Why did Miuccia Prada stop designing clothes with stripes? Because she couldn't straighten them out, they were always Prada-angled!"

The third joke - "Why did Miuccia Prada refuse to design a line of winter coats? Because she didn't want to be known as the 'Prada Puffer'!" - would have been funnier if "puffer" was interpreted as a slang term like the ones defined in the Urban Dictionary (that offers as definition for "puffer" a pot smoker who forgets to share when in a circle passing a blunt, bong or pipe; a woman who has a thick mound of pubic hair that fills or puffs out her panties or bikini and a woman who accidentally farts during intercourse).

Yet ChatGPT had something else in mind: by inverting the roles and telling the system the same joke it created, ChatGPT provided explanations, but, for two out of three Prada jokes, it provided the same explanation and also highlighted how the term puffer was referred to the jacket.    

By adopting the same style of jokes ChatGPT seemed to favour and requesting to provide a joke that answered the question, "Why did Jean Paul Gaultier refuse to work with Miuccia Prada?" the system came up with a nonsensical "Because he didn't want to be upstaged by her Prada-giorno attitude!"

Asked to explain the Prada-giorno situation, the AI system enthusiastically stated "Certainly!" and then proceeded to show off its knowledge of the Italian language. "'Prada-giorno' is a pun on the phrase 'buongiorno,' which means 'good morning' in Italian. 'Prada' is a reference to the fashion brand founded by Miuccia Prada, while 'giorno' is the Italian word for 'day.' The joke is that Jean Paul Gaultier didn't want to work with Miuccia Prada because he didn't want to be overshadowed by her influence or reputation in the fashion industry, hence the play on words with 'Prada-giorno' implying her dominance."

ChatGPT at the moment is currently being explored for its potential for marketing, product descriptions, customer service and creative storytelling, with some positive results, but, from these jokes you may guess that the system is not ready for comedy yet (nor for fashion jokes...).

But what about AI-text-to-image tools? Can they create credible fashion caricatures? We put Midjourney to the test asking to create cartoons of three famous fashion designers so that the system could have easily found references on the Internet. In none of the cases the system was required to create cartoons "in the style of (a specific illustrator)". 

Asked to create a cartoon of Giorgio Armani with white hair wearing a navy jumper and trousers and white shoes, the system created a pretty boring rendition of the subject (with black shoes). There wasn't anything specific in the drawing, like a facial feature or an expression, that could have helped somebody identifying the man in the illustration as Armani.

Required to provide a cartoon of fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier with white hair wearing a long sleeved shirt with white and blue stripes and a black kilt and smiling, the system came up with several botched attempts, most times showing a sort of hooligan-like figure with a threatening, angry or annoyed expression on his face, before eventually getting to a more relaxed portrait of the designer wearing a striped black and white outfit.  Asked to provide a cartoon of Miuccia Prada in a pleated skirt and jumper, it came up with a series of possibilities, going from an angry Miuccia with hands on her hips to a stylish yet sketchy rendition of Miuccia and to a slightly more cartoonish rendition of the designer in her office/studio (a space that the AI system hadn't been requested to provide, but that looked like a viable option). In one case, the system also seemed to recreate Miuccia's style with a full skirt with some decorative motifs, matched with a pristine sweater with a collar reminiscent of Miu Miu designs.

At this stage you could say that comedians may not be at risk of being replaced by an AI application that soon, while, for what regards fashion cartoons, two out three images generated by Midjourney, may have been used to illustrate an article about Gaultier or Prada. The AI software in these cases also tried to highlight some facial features, like a cartoonist would do, putting emphasis on Gaultier's nose and ears, or recreating Miuccia's hairstyle. That said, these were just quick caricatures portraying one designer per illustration and the system struggled to come up with more complex cartoons featuring three fashion designers, creating generic figures. In a nutshell, the human touch is still needed, especially when irony's involved.

Will Most Fashion Houses Launch their Own Artificial Intelligence Departments or Turn to AI-Powered Tools in Future?

As seen in yesterday's post, we are experiencing a boom in the usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in different sectors, including healthcare. Fashion-wise we have seen some attempts at using AI text-to-image apps on the runway during the latest fashion shows, namely in prints (Christopher Kane) or images re-elaborated with a human touch (Coperni), but also in advertising campaigns (Moncler) and look books.

During Paris Men's Fashion Week, for example, Vuarnet used AI for a look book in which an IRL image was juxtaposed to an AI generated interpretation of the same image in a "natural" environment.

As the frenzy around NFTs is dispelling, a new star, Artificial Intelligence, is on the rise and the technology is also progressing extremely fast with image generators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion often prominently featured in the news on a daily basis.

One of the most surprising things is that some artists producing fantasy images of unlikely collaborations and imaginary collections are coming up with fictitious products that look more desirable than the original ones: when Nike dropped the first images of its Tiffany collaboration, many fans of the two brands were disappointed at the banality of the final product - a black Nike sneaker with a Tiffany green swoosh. It didn't look unique nor desirable.

In the meantime, Midjourney AI artists such as Rickdick produced fantasy sneakers in Tiffany green covered in sparkling gems or in intricate three-dimensional flowers, looking not just innovative and fun, but extremely desirable. As the Midjourney or Stable Diffusion aesthetics spread, impacting on consumers and changing tastes, the debate about AI intensifies.

The main fear is that AI tools will replace human jobs: but, as seen in the previous post about healthcare, Artificial Intelligence tools produce the best results when used alongside doctors.

In the same way, in the design field, these systems are better employed when they are at the service of designers who may benefit from the help of other professional figures such as prompt engineers (by the way, it would actually be refreshing to see more young women getting into this sector and becoming AI specialists).

AI text-to-image platforms seem very straightforward to us, we think we just have to write down a simple prompt and some extraordinary image or garment in the case of fashion prompts will appear on our screen almost by magic, but that's not how things work.

A well-written prompt is of vital importance if you want to come up with great results and very polished images. An example of how intricate a prompt can be was offered by Reddit user CurryPuff 99 who recreated a photographic interpretation of the famous "Lofi girl" Japanese-style animation. A step-to-step guide of this process was posted on the Eluna.ai Instagram account.

The results are stunning and prove the prompt is not just a questions of typing down a mere description such as "Studying girl with stack of books and brown flower pot on table, brown cat on white window ledge", but of being able to add notes on the CFG scale, the size of the image, mask blur, denoising strength and so on.

If design teams at fashion houses are interested in employing AI images in their work and pursuing such levels of precision, the most powerful fashion houses will have to establish their own AI department (mind you, some of them already have it…) where they can train a neural network with their own archival images (an archivist and fashion historian would be handy, obviously).

Another asset for a fashion house could be a prompt engineer who could lead the AI and allow it at the same time to express itself generating a new aesthetic for the fashion house in question.

This relatively new figure will have to work together with the designer, but also with the in-house graphic artists: images generated with AI software but without using original archival images of the house in question, may prove borrowed or "inspired" to collections of other houses and will have to be scrapped; images resulting from blends of archival pictures may instead need some graphic interventions, but may in the end generate something new.

The "/blend" prompt in Midjourney allows, for example, to mix together two or more images and this fairly simple blending exercise may be the first step towards creating something new or an experimental look. In this post there is an example of a blend of Dior's iconic bar suit with a design from Raf Simons' Dior A/W 15 collection.

The first raw results may not be convincing, but they can be tweaked, upscaled, remastered, altered and in the end Photoshopped by a graphic designer.

Such exercises - when supported by a neural network trained with a robust selection of archival images - may even lead to capsule collections of blended looks or to blended pictures that may be used in an exhibition as well.

But there are other changes that may be implemented in fashion companies: some may indeed opt to speed up their own systems with other deep learning models. Some companies recently turned to Cala's new artificial intelligence tools.

Built using OpenAI's advanced AI system DALL-E, fashion supply chain platform Cala allows to generate a variety of designs and alter them with text descriptions or upload personal images and come up with an impressive variety of apparel and accessories.
The system has a free option or a subscription plan: you start by selecting a template or a product (the range is wide and includes outerwear, dresses, sweats, hats, swimwear, bags, socks and so on).

The next step consists in adding the language prompts in the "Adjectives and Materials" section to describe colours, styles and materials (the images of the puffer jacket in this post were generated by the prompt "rainbow coloured, geometrical, hexagons, allover, repeated pattern"), adding more specifications in the "Trims and Features" section ("pockets", "hood", "zipper", "logo patch" for example). The next step is to choose if the system should generate a photorealistic image or a flat sketch.Cala will generate six examples of products, but, if you're not satisfied with them, you can click on "Regenerate" and you will be able to go through hundreds of versions and iterations to try and tune the designs obtained with what you had in mind. As an alternative, you can also upload an image of a garment you've created and DALL-E will return six images with slightly different variations of the original design.

An entire design team can work together on the Cala platform and, once you're finished, you'll be able to start producing the item you created as well. Cala offers indeed production facilities through its ghost team of designers who create patterns. The company is also linked to 20 factories located in 13 different countries.

In a nutshell, a system like Cala can facilitate the design process from product ideation through order fulfillment (please note that prices vary according to the items you order), all in one go and in a few minutes. The platform works with all sorts of brands: from large established fashion houses to independent designers. Besides, Cala also offers a mobile app (for iPhone) that allows users to design on the go, following the creation process from start to finish on a mobile device.

Cala promises users they will be able to run their fashion houses and, while we do know that running a fashion house is no mean feat, the platform seems to lift a lot of stress off the shoulders of designers with its fully automated process. There's secrecy on the designers and celebrities already using it but, according to the platform, there are already quite a few ones.

In a way these processes are all part of a digital transformation of the fashion industry: fifteen years ago, we were amazed by the possibilities of digital printing on fabrics; then came 3D printing technology that went from the production of rigidly unwearable clothes to soft and perfectly wearable pieces. Covid-19 pushed the digital revolution towards new worlds populated by avatars and digital wardrobes, but, in this post-pandemic state, we are pursuing new developments through AI.

But if the fashion industry is mutating, so is the role of the creative director who, rather than designing, is focusing on editing products, curating collections and maybe spinning a cohesive story around them (you may argue this was already the function of the late Virgil Abloh and it is the role that Louis Vuitton has in mind for his current successor at the French house, producer, songwriter, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams).

Among the other entities gravitating around fashion houses and going through some changes because of AI tools there are advertising agencies. Using Artificial Intelligence is helping them to generate quick ideas and reducing the time dedicated to drafts. Educational institutions as well will have to go through some changes: balancing manual and technological skills will be a key point for students as some jobs at entry levels in fashion houses will be eliminated by the advent of AI departments and those who already know how to navigate this reality will be facilitated in finding other positions. Learning to balance manual and technological skills will be an asset: no AI is able to carry out manual processes, but AI tools also need a human to provide us with the best results, so improving both skills will be of paramount importance.

It is obvious that all these processes will imply a change in copyright laws as well: we have seen how the US Office didn't grant the registration of a comic created with the support of Midjourney, yet prompts are original concepts, they are the results of a set of skills provided by a human giving the machine an order, and it takes time to alter and hone the final picture, a process made by the machine, but triggered by a human being.

Who will be completely dropped by fashion houses as AI applications become more popular? Probably influencers who don't have any side skills apart from their looks represent the weakest link in the fashion chain of evolution at the moment. They can take all the Ozempic they want to fit in the sample clothes they are given for free, but fashion houses now have to feed several K-pop icons turned global ambassadors and sustain AI systems, platforms and teams to transition into a fast-paced digital future. For such houses it will be crucial optimizing their earnings and this will imply making drastic cuts.

Nowadays it is already possible to hire AI generated models (from Deep Agency that also offers the possibility of creating a virtual twin with an avatar that looks like you), and that's probably what some houses will do to save money. Where will the industry look for their out of the box thinkers who may turn into unlikely assets? Probably among the vibrant communities on the best Discord servers tagged with technology. Some of their members may not know much about fashion or look as hip as the characters populating the front row at fashion show, but, soon, knowing your technology will be trendier than peacocking outside fashion show venues.   

Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Women's Healthcare

It's International Women's Day and, to be honest, there isn't much to celebrate if you're a woman. Though it's a fundamental human right, gender equality is often ignored all over the world; violence against women is rife and women also suffer harm and abuses online on a daily basis. And let’s not talk about women's chronic pain, rarely addressed by doctors and most often undertreated and dismissed or attributed to vague and mysterious psychological causes, while menopause remains for many doctors an uncharted territory.

Yet, in all this bleakness there may be some great news for what regards healthcare where women may find an unlikely ally in future – Artificial Intelligence (AI).

As early as 2017, the Imperial College in London led a consortium of breast cancer experts, clinicians and academics to explore whether AI could help detect and diagnose breast cancers more effectively.

The most common cancer in women worldwide, breast cancer has seen some great medical advances in the last ten years or so, but, unfortunately, it can still kill.

Used by clinicians to identify cancers early, mammograms (breast screenings) are not perfect, and can lead to an incorrect diagnosis, to false negative and false positive results, as cancer can be hidden or masked in mammograms by overlapping dense breast tissue. Screenings can help picking up cancer early when it is still curable, but many types of cancers are missed or detected at a late stage when they are more difficult to treat.

The ability to detect breast cancers can be improved training Artificial Intelligence (AI) to learn from databases of mammograms collected from clinics and academic institutions. In the last few years there have been experimental studies using digital images stripped of any information: they are used to train computer algorithms that analyse these images and learn to spot a cancerous growth by its shape, density and location. After learning to recognise these cases, the system creates a mathematical representation of normal mammograms and of mammograms presenting cancers. Comparing the data, the system can then track down abnormalities in a mammogram, spot signs of cancerous tissue and alert radiologists, while refining its accuracy of detection at the same time.

In 2020 radiologists found that an Artificial intelligence software developed by Google Health, was able to outperform detecting cancers that specialists had missed. The results of these studies were encouraging with scientists training Google's AI program with mammograms from more than 76,000 women in the UK and 15,000 women in the US. The mammograms were analysed in three different ways before combing the results to produce an overall risk score. The results were encouraging: the AI programme reduced of 5.7% and 1.2% (USA and UK) the false positives and of 9.4% and 2.7% the false negatives, proving it could have boosted the quality of breast cancer screening.

Healthcare facilities all over the world and in particular in the United States and the European Union are also beginning to test or provide data to help develop the systems. In Europe, Great Britain and Finland are working on adding this technology to their screenings, while Hungary has developed research projects that employ AI software to spot cancer. As reported last week by The New York Times, Bács-Kiskun County Hospital, outside Budapest, is one of the five hospitals or clinics performing breast cancer scans employing the help of AI programs.

There have been cases in which two radiologists failed to detect breast cancer, while the Artificial Intelligence software flagged the screening as potentially cancerous, detecting tiny lesions and spotting the insurgence of a malignancy. AI software can recognise also more difficult forms of breast cancer and produces accurate results on women of all ages, ethnicities and body types.

While AI software can be used to detect other forms of cancer, maybe one day it will also be used for other conditions (could AI software help with autoimmune diseases that are notoriously difficult to diagnose?) or will it be able to answer women's questions regarding pain syndromes dismissed by doctors?

Time will tell, but more clinical trials and more training will be needed and it will take time before AI tools get implemented on a vast scale in all sorts of hospitals, especially considering that, subject to all sorts of cuts, not all healthcare facilities may be able to afford such systems. So, for the time being, don't expect to go to your usual clinic, ask if the mammography you have to do is powered by AI and assume you will get a beaming smile and an encouraging "Yes, of course!" Finding major partners from the high-tech industries may be a solution for those healthcare facilities who desire to implement their screenings with AI software, but, who knows, maybe even big fashion groups could sponsor such AI programs one day? After all, the fashion industry often preaches a form of faux feminism, repeating the "empowering women" mantra, but essentially relegating women to the role of consumers.

Like AI text-to-image applications and Chat GPT, systems that scare those critics who are afraid of machines replacing human jobs, also AI tools employed in the medical field received some harsh criticism, as some fear they may replace radiologists one day. Yet, while the use of AI software in the detection of breast (and other forms of) cancer (as well) and in medical imaging in general, is encouraging (and it may be an asset considering there is a shortfall in radiologists in many countries, often due to older radiologists retiring faster than new ones join), AI tools must be researched further, even though so far they have shown an impressive ability in their diagnostic performances.

That said, while these tools do improve the diagnostic accuracy, they produce the best results when used in partnership with trained doctors. Using such systems can cut radiologists' workloads by at least 30 percent, but the key is always to have an AI-plus-doctor rather than just a doctor alone. Looks like the possibilities of AI may be endless, and one day, from dreaded villain, AI may turn into a great tool and a reliable partner as well in a variety of industries and disciplines.

Of Wolves & Lambs, Of Humans & Robots: Coperni A/W 23

During the latest fashion weeks, some designers opted to go minimal and strip shows of theatrical moments, re-shifting the attention on the actual clothes; others, instead, attempted to step into the future and did so with a high-tech stunt. 

The Coperni duo had a spray-on dress that went viral on their S/S 23 runway; but, for the new collection, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant explored the possibilities offered by robots.

For the new show, staged at the Théâtre National de la Danse during Paris Fashion Week, the duo recruited five Boston Dynamics robot "Spot" dogs and employed them to restage Jean de la Fontaine's brutal "Le Loup et l'Agneau" (The Wolf and the Lamb), replacing the main characters in the fable with robots and humans and giving the story a new ending.

Capelets (for that Red Riding Hood twist...) abounded in a variety of fabrics, including bi-coloured nylon and tweed. Gustave Doré's illustration for the fable, featuring a robo-dog instead of the wolf, was turned into a toile de jouy effect on a shirt and a dress.

Leather trousers incorporated untrimmed off-cut leather skirts and there were more skirts and dresses with an irregular hem. An oversized hand-shaped brooch that called to mind an emoji, used to pinch the fabric in strategic places on tops and dresses, represented a surreal moment, while a real-life handbag was shaped after the iPhone emoji.

A faux fur coat gave out a wolf vibe (and was rebalanced at the end of the show by a faux lamb fur vest and mini-dress...), while a leather mini-dress with a ripped hem looked as if it may have been longer, but had been dramatically shortened during a brutal fight with an animal, and seemed a metaphor for an empowered Red Riding Hood turned huntress.

Then there was an Alexander McQueen moment reminiscent of the designer's "No. 13" catwalk show (S/S 1999) with robotic arms spraying in black and yellow a white cotton muslin dress donned by Shalom Harlow.

Model Rianne Van Rompaey interacted with a Spot dog mounted with a robotic arm on the top of its body. They seemed to kiss while many in the audience and at home must have dreaded disaster and a robot going crazy and ripping her face apart. Luckily,  the robo apocalypse didn't happen, but the Spot dog grabbed her blanket jacket, tore it off and then gave it back to her.

This conclusion rewrote the original fable in a more positive key to show people that humans and machines can live in harmony, unlocking the second part of the collection.

After this interlude, the show shifted indeed to the more technologically driven designs, from densely furry coats and tops in light reactive recycled nylon (70% of the collection was recycled) made in collaboration with fashion school Les Arts Decoratifs, to leather jackets featuring human paintings of a robot and a lamb generated with AI text-to-image software DALL-E and the brand's signature Swipe bag made for the occasion with a 55,000-year-old meteorite found in 1968 in the South of France and carved in 2023 (the bag appeared in previous runways sculpted in glass and gold).

In this part of the show a robot also held onto Lila Moss' mini Swipe painted bag, before giving it back as she passed by, and, at the end of the show, the machines took a bow.

So, what's the verdict on the robotic stunt? Though eye catching thanks to their vibrant yellow shade, the robots looked unsettling to many commentators who took to Instagram to note that similar models of robots can get mounted with a machine gun and be turned into a lethal weapon.

Yet there was nothing to fear in this case: Boston Dynamics mainly makes two types of robots, Stretch and Spot. The former is used in warehouse operations, while Spot can be used for a variety of applications.

Fit with an Artificial Intelligence that the company calls "athletic intelligence", Spot can walk, climb stairs, avoid obstacles, traverse difficult terrain, and autonomously follow preset routes with little or no input from users, as the company's site explains. This agile machine is ideal for inspection tasks and can be used in emergencies to gather insights in dangerous areas, inspect gauges machinery and pipes. Fitted with a snake-like arm, it can grasp, lift and carry a variety of materials and items, flip levers, turn valves and manipulate objects (last year Spot robots were also sent to Ukraine to help nonprofit demining enterprise Halo Trust to clean up mines).

Boston Dynamics highlights on its site that their products are designed for industrial and commercial use and that they are available for sale for commercial, industrial, enterprise and university research uses, but they are not intended for purchase by individuals for non-commercial use.

Police and fire departments are using Spot to get remote visibility into potentially dangerous situations and remote inspections of hazardous environments. Besides, police departments use Spot to inspect suspicious packages and environments for hazardous materials or explosives, assess hostile threats remotely, and to search structurally dangerous environments in emergency response scenarios.

Spot is not designed to conduct mass surveillance, or to replace police officers and the company's policy specifically does not authorize the use of these robots as weapons. All buyers are indeed prohibited from such use, besides the policy also prohibits weaponizing Boston Dynamics' robots. The Coperni duo decided to work with them after reading the company's pledge not to mount weapons on their machines.

That said, while nobody watching the show live or following it online, expected the robots to create 15 yards of delicate bobbin lace in 15 seconds, it looked like the interactions were limited and to have the robots grabbing a garment or holding a handbag was a bit like Bezos spending a lot of money for an 11-minute suborbital flight. In a nutshell, a waste of the most advanced technology.

McQueen's robotic stunt entered the fashion legend because it had a purpose, showing a creative interaction between machines and humans, with the robots from the automotive industry reinvented as fashion designers and painters. Sure, there was a lot of work to do here as well to coordinate the choreography and the robots had to practice for weeks at Boston Dynamics's HQ, choreographed by dancer and movement director Eric Christison remotely from Paris. But at the same time, there was no real creative purpose behind this interaction. 

Besides, the clothes became secondary, so that the reflective light garments, a mini-dress covered in metallic feathers and perfectly wearable and desirable long wool and leather coats, went largely unseen, overshadowed by the viral moment.

It feels that nowadays the Internet buzz is everything, the Instagrammable moment is indeed what makes or breaks you and it is all you need to quickly grab people's attention in between cute cat videos.

Coperni claim their technological interventions are part of their fashion experience, they represent moments that introduce innovation and help them getting attention and increase sales. Bets are open to what they will do next (mind you, they sounded enthusiastic about their experiments with AI, so maybe they will investigate this possibility further), yet fewer distractions from the garments and a bit more focus on the textile research that went into them wouldn't be a bad idea.

An Anatomy of Tailoring: Alexander McQueen A/W 23

Though taken from the semantic field of clothing and adornment, the word "cutter" bears some sinister connotations. It calls to mind not just a professional figure working in a tailoring workshop, but conjures up visions of cutting tools and, consequently, of blood as well. It's a word best embodied by Leonard Burling, the English cutter with a mysterious past who runs a custom tailor shop in Graham Moore’s film The Outfit.

Maybe it is the double-edged meaning of this word that Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen had in mind while working on the house's A/W 23 collection, showcased last Saturday during Paris Fashion Week.

Returning to the Paris runway after a three-year absence, Burton put the sharpness of tailoring at the forefront of the collection. So, like other designers in Paris, Burton went back to the beginnings of the house and in particular to the formative years of its founder on Savile Row.

Rigorous tailoring inspired her a genderless corseted jumpsuit, waist-nipping jackets, a series of black suits, tailored strapless dresses and pinstriped coats and suits in which the broken pinstripes seemed drawn with a tailor's chalk (an effect inspired by the scene in Todd Field's film Tár in which a tailor makes chalk marks on the fabric for the protagonist's suit View this photo).

Burton's precision hinted at restriction, but also at subversion with dresses that looked as if they were made disassembling a jacket or turning it upside down and twisting it around the body, and jackets in which the upper collar was elongated and formed a notch at mid-torso height.

One three quarter jacket was turned upside down and the hem formed another lapel. Visually that was a clever optical illusion achieved via tailoring; metaphorically, it hinted at the topsy-turvy world we live in (an idea reinforced by a video rendition of the stop-motion Victorian photography of Eadweard Muybridge ran upside down on the walls of the venue).

The same precision was applied to workwear-inspired ensembles in denim, while decadently elegant and erotically charged (petals were strategically placed on the body) prints of giant orchids on dramatic trenchcoats, pointed at the poisonous tropical flowers in Jean des Esseintes' À rebours and the description of these flowers in the book came to mind: "Then, there are flowers of noble lineage like the orchid, so delicate and charming, at once cold and palpitating, exotic flowers exiled in the heated glass palaces of Paris, princesses of the vegetable kingdom living in solitude."

The idea of rigorous sharpness pointing at the body and therefore at flesh and blood, unlocked another inspiration – anatomy.

To build a great piece, a talented fashion designer must know the structure of a garment, but also the configuration of the body, starting with the bones.

References to bones first appeared in this collection in a black dress that looked like a modern reinvention of Schiaparelli's skeleton dress, and that featured a padded cordon tracing the human silhouettes around the shoulders, arms and hips.

Anatomy redirected Burton towards Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical sketches that she used as the main inspiration for her knitwear: the drawings showing sliced limbs and the internal structure of muscles, allowed Burton to come up with knitwear dresses with braided cables forming an unravelling skirt and tops with cutouts.

The same technique was applied to a dark blood red dress covered in bugle beads that ended in a slashed skirt (a hint at McQueen's ruby red Joan of Arc dress, at the end of his A/W 1998 show in London? Maybe, after all the musical note soundtrack of the "Joan" collection played in reverse in this show).

As seen in previous posts, anatomy has always provided great inspirations in fashion (Christopher Kane's S/S 23 collection was inspired by this theme), yet Burton didn't offer a literal interpretation of this discipline, but preferred to reinterpret Leonardo da Vinci's drawings through materials and techniques.

Knowing the starting point for these designs it became easy to see strips of flesh in the hanging strips of fabric covered in beads, while a silver design, a sort of St. Joan of Arc armour replicating the structure of the muscles, but also the shape of an orchid around the bodice, reunited all the three main inspirations in this collection – tailoring, anatomy and decadent botany.

A/W 23 Sub-Trends: Going Back to the Beginning, Finding a New Beginning

One sub-trend that has emerged from the A/W 23 collections is the desire of some fashion houses and designers to go back to the roots of their practice via an emphasis on fabrics or to go back to the beginning of their careers and rediscover some of their most successful pieces.

This trend also characterised the contents of the press releases: for quite a few years now fashion houses have accustomed us to press releases that sounded in part like essays. Often they displayed more conceptual ideas than preoccupations with real matters and, while philosophically interesting, some of them sounded very abstract. Yet in some press releases for the A/W 23 collections, designers re-shifted the attention onto something more tangible and less abstract, in particular textiles and fabrics employed in their collections.

Some, like Anrealage, did so to highlight the innovative materials included in their collection; others did it to show their research into sustainability.

Rick Owens, for example, unexpectedly put emphasis on his textiles in the press release for his A/W 23 collection, showcased on Thursday during Paris Fashion Week.

The designer explained that the collection featured GRS certified recycled cashmere and polyamide, responsible wool (materials employed for his monastic knitted capelets and ribbed dresses slashed one side and trailing down the runway) and vegetal tanning.

The shredded and fraying denim designs for the jackets, coats and skirts, was instead indigo denim from Japan. After treating it with a mineral wash, the fabric was shredded by lasers to obtain this effect, the press notes highlighted.

Owens also included in the collection a reinvented version of Charles James' iconic 1937 padded jacket, a piece he already borrowed twelve years ago and that he reinvented in this collection, deconstructing it, making it look less sculptural around the shoulder areas and upping its volume, but retaining its Haute Couture flair.

Yesterday, Rei Kawakubo explained to the fashion press that, through Comme des Garçons' new collection, she was trying to go back to the beginning of the world. This was symbolically done by focusing on a variety of materials and working with free patterns.

Fabrics took center stage and were used to create trademark Comme silhouettes, bulbous, lumpy, geometrical or abstract.

Models walked in groups of two, three and four and symbolically represented 11 chapters of a story on the runway, each characterized by a different soundtrack that went from Siouxsie and the Banshees to Sun Ra & the Arkestra, from Can to L7.

At the beginning of the show, the models donned square oversized tops characterized by primitive tailoring and matched with spherical skirts, some of them decorated with doughnut-shaped padded elements or with rolls of fabrics resembling scrolls. Then came flat black padded fabrics with pleated ruffles of frothy tulle protruding.

Kawakubo also played with exaggerations in a dress with an oversized Peter Pan collar, and with the accumulation technique, adding tone on tone shocking pink roses in one design and bows or onion-shaped elements in others.

The technique also inspired the headdresses: the most colourful ones looked like assemblages of a very simple craft material, children's pipe cleaners (thanks, now we know what to do with the leftovers of a botched domestic craft project!)

The final dresses integrated instead soft cage-like structures (or were those architectural girders?) in the same colour of the designs.

Another designer who felt he had to press the reset button and go back to the beginning was Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga.

In this case the choice was dictated by the advertising Balenciaga-gate incident, a scandal revolving around bondage teddy-bears and Supreme Court ruling papers related to a landmark child pornography case.

After that Gvasalia decided to hide from prying eyes and focus on his work. This new direction also inspired today's show in Paris: Gvasalia scrapped indeed the theatrical runway and put the spotlight on the clothes. Abandoning the mega set wasn't a bad idea, considering that for years it overshadowed the collections (in general, actually, not just Balenciaga's).

Eliminating the dystopian sets, mud pits included, meant no more distractions and the possibility to experiment more on deconstructions. Gvasalia announced that with this collection he wanted to carry forward Cristóbal Balenciaga's legacy, yet the runway was more about himself than about the founder of the house, with pants transformed into jackets, trench coats with ample shoulders, biker clothes and his trademark floral-print dresses forming the glossary for the A/W 23 season. Stirring the ship out of the storm will not be easy for Gvasalia and Balenciaga, but there may be a new beginning ahead for both, marked also by the elimination of logos and visible branding.

Beginnings are tricky things. For the Gospel of John in the beginning there was the Word, for The Slits, in the beginning there was rhythm. But beginnings are also very exciting as they help us telling a story in a different way.

The writer Alexander Trocchi never seemed to be happy with one beginning, he would indeed find different beginnings to tell the same story and to look at it from different points of view. Conclusions are the tricky bits, instead, because that's when you have to wrap things up in a convincing way. But fashion doesn't care about conclusions as it never ends, it goes around in circles and that's why going back to the roots or to the beginning works particularly well in this industry.

The Importance of Patents in Fashion Design

In the last two posts, we looked at a fashion collection and at costumes that use technologically advanced fabrics or a set of magnets integrated in the garments to trigger a transformation of some kind, a fashion metamorphosis. But fashion designers and creators who come up with these solutions and can be considered also inventors, can take a unique and innovative system or a technology that they have developed to the next stage by patenting it.

Obtaining a patent, especially a worldwide one is not easy, but it can represent a great achievement and lead to further collaborations with other industries and sectors.

In previous posts we looked at patent pioneers such as polymath Loïe Fuller and Italian footwear designer Salvatore Ferragamo. As you may remember, Ferragamo registered over 360 patents between 1927 and 1964, that referred to shoes and shoe parts as well.

In 1968, Pierre Cardin invented instead a synthetic fabric dubbed "Cardine" that featured a three-dimensional pattern. The fabric made with heat-moulded bonded Dynel (a copolymer of acrylonitrile and vinyl chloride and the trade name for a type of synthetic material used in fiber reinforced plastic composite materials, especially for marine applications) that could be pre-shaped or sewn to couture standards. Cardin's uncrushable pre-formed designs made with this material incorporated decorative three-dimensional geometric patterns that would go back to their original shape even after the garment was washed. 

 

The company kept on patenting designs till Cardin's death in 2020, one of the latest (USD904502S1; Download USD904502_Pierre Cardin), refers to an ornamental design for spectacles and it is actually based on a previous patent/design. 

Like Cardin, also Donatella Versace patented an ornamental design for eyeglasses for her company (USD675245S1; Download USD675245_Versace), but also several other items, including perfume bottles (such as USD695126S1; Download USD695126_Versace), several pieces of interior design (from a sofa to an armchair and a table) and footwear soles (USD882229S1; Download USD882229_Versace).

Giorgio Armani also patented a few items and procedures, including the ornamental design for a bag (USD821744S1; Download USD821744_Armani), men's trousers with variable fit (ITMI20022786A1) and the actual procedure to make a pair of trousers (ITMI20011636A1). In the history of fashion, women proved to be consistent inventors: the smartest was Bonnie Cashin who registered several patents for ensembles under her name with the US office as early as 1940, some of them for coats, skirt suits and dresses with her trademark kiss lock pckets (for example USD157566S; Download USD157566_BCashin; or USD157567S; Download USD157567_BCashin).  Some patents include drawings and images, others only text, and, in some cases, they show the meticulous and complex research behind the invention.

In Thursday's post we mentioned a patent by Italian fashion designer and artist Cinzia Ruggeri regarding a dark fabric, leather or hide with a layer of microencapsulated liquid crystals of cholesteric nature (Download US4510188_CRuggeri).

"The main object of the present invention is that of providing a fabric in which the chromatic effect is variable with the environmental conditions," the section regarding the objects and summary of this invention explained.

"A more specific object of the present invention is to provide a fabric whose color, either totally or in some predetermined parts thereof, varies with varying the temperatures or upon varying the visual angle under which the fabric is observed." The text then becomes very technical, providing also detailed liquid crystal compositions that change colours at different temperatures.

Ruggeri's research focused on textiles that changed colour as they changed temperature, and recently there has been a research that has developed further the possibilities of reactive textiles. 

In February this year, a team from the Multifunctional Materials Design research group at Aalto University in collaboration with researchers at the University of Cambridge, developed reactive textiles which respond to changes in temperature and change shape when heated. 

The new fabrics move from Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) developed in the 1980s. This smart material that can respond to heat, light, or other stimuli, has so far been used as thin films in soft robotics. Although LCEs have been made into fibres, so far they haven't been made into textiles.

Researchers used instead LCE yarns to make woven fabric using conventional textile crafting techniques and tested how they behaved. The team wove LCE yarn in different patterns to make plain fabric, satin, twill, and a weft rib fabric. They made two versions of each pattern using either a soft or stiff LCE yarn, and tested the response of the fabric to heat from an infrared lamp. All of the LCE fabrics contracted as they warmed up, though the exact response differed from pattern to pattern. The changes were reversible – the patterns relaxed back to their original shape as their temperature dropped.

The team also combined LCE yarns with linen and nylon in a radial pattern to weave a circle that would lift itself into a cone when heated. Heating the pattern caused the LCE yarn to contract, pulling the cloth up into a cone. As it cooled, the cone relaxed back into a flat circle.

The new finding would offer new possibilities as this material could be applied for adjustable aesthetics or used for other applications such as monitoring health, improve thermal insulation and provide new tools for managing room acoustics and interior design.

In between collections, capsules, collaborations, promotions and social media, fashion designers nowadays may not have a lot of time to experiment and find innovative and patentable materials, systems and designs. But it is important to experiment and develop ambitious ideas to create something unique, opening in this way also new research paths for those who will come after.

Magnetic Metamorphosis: Learning a Costume Design Trick from "Lohengrin" @ The Metropolitan Opera, New York

In yesterday's post we looked at metamorphosis in a fashion collection through technologically advanced textiles. Let's continue the thread by looking at a system that allows instead to create a quick mutation in the costumes for a recent production of Richard Wagner's "Lohengrin", currently on at New York's Metropolitan Opera (running through April 1st). Directed by François Girard, this new staging features tenor Piotr Beczała in the title role, bass Günther Groissböck (King Heinrich), bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin (Telramund) and sopranos Tamara Wilson (Elsa) and Christine Goerke (Ortrud).

"Lohengrin" has often been reinvented throughout the years, with settings varying and including a laboratory and a classroom. Last performerd on the Lincoln Center stage in 2007, this new production by Girard is transported into another realm, a sort of post-apocalyptic world with a sci-fi twist about it, symbolized by a wall hanging at an angle over the stage with a huge hole opening onto the sky.

Tim Yip (Academy Award Winner for his set and costume design for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") designed the costumes and sets for this new staging.

The production was originally conceived in collaboration with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it was first performed last year on the day Russia invaded Ukraine.  As the war started, The Met severed its links with the Bolshoi and everything – from the sets to the costumes – had to be recreated in the United States.

The story of this romantic opera follows Lohengrin, a mystical and mysterious knight, who arrives among the people of Brabant to defend an innocent woman, Elsa, accused of having killed her brother. Piotr Beczała as Lohengrin, Parsifal's son, wears in this new production the same minimalist modern-day attire of the Grail defenders - black trousers and white button-down shirt - in Girard's previous production of "Parsifal". Yip designed instead for the other characters black cotton cloaks that display some connections with medieval robes.

Some characters are also provided with heavy armour-like jewels. Moving from his experience of the pandemic and thoughts of the war in Ukraine, Yip left behind the traditional language of the theatre and turned to abstract inspirations creating symbolic visual moments revolving around a palette comprising a trio of colours - saturated reds, deep greens and neutral white – shades used for the silk double-layer linings of the cloaks.

Green hints at royal authority and at King Heinrich, who has arrived in Brabant with his followers to rally the locals to join him in fighting off an invasion from the east; red is the color of the native Brabantians, who are under the influence of Friedrich von Telramund and his wife, the sorceress Ortrud; white evokes the innocence and purity of Elsa, defended by Lohengrin.

On stage there is a rivalry between those who support Lohengrin the rescuer and those who want to conspire against him, and, to symbolize this shifting allegiance of the Brabant people towards one character or the other, and their uncertainties and doubts, Yip came up with a stratagem.

The costume designer integrated a set of magnets in the choristers' robe: the magnets allows them to reveal their linings in accordance with the dramatic needs of the moment (check out the opera trailer on YouTube or at the end of this post to get an idea). By revealing their colours, the choristers symbolically allow the audience to discover their allegiances and therefore their feelings and inner thoughts.

This solution may be replicated during a runway to achieve a quick (and less noisy compared to Velcro) metamorphosis in a garment and impress or surprise the audience. But, please, remember to strategically place the magnets (Yip was very meticulous and made sure the set of magnets was placed at a specific height so that the performers could easily reach it).

Not everything worked out at the first performances: the trick proved tiring to some critics who complained about the choristers struggling with the magnets. So, if you opt for this solution, don't overcomplicate the design and hide the magnets in strategic places.  

Metamorphosis, Mutability & Perceptual Alterations in the Eye of the Beholder: Anrealage A/W 23

Nowadays it often happens that an innovative technique that has been around for a while suddenly goes viral after it is presented in a visually or conceptually striking way on a runway. It is only then that the vast majority of people catch up and realize that it exists and start raving and ranting about it.

Fans of Kunihiko Morinaga's Anrealage collections do remember that the designer has been working for at least a decade on contrasts between lights and shadows, experimenting with his photosensitive fabrics and photonic-crystal fibers, consistently playing with light reactive textiles and designing intriguing garments that react in different ways according to the angle and intensity of the light hitting them, letting other colours or patterns appear.

In 2016 Morinaga applied these effects also to the uniforms of the staff at the Momentum Factory Orii, a traditional copperware colouring workshop, and introduced them also in Fendi's A/W 2020 menswear collection.

Anrealage's A/W 23 collection, showcased on Tuesday during Paris Fashion Week, moved once again from ultraviolet reactive fabrics and textiles with light-dependent color-changing photochromic properties, but it was presented with a new and even more innovative technology.

Models in similar but not identical white garments walked on stage, some wearing ensembles in which the back and front looked the same. UV-emitting tubes scanned the models from their heads to their feet while Ravel's "Boléro" played in the background.

The mesmerizing notes of Ravel creating a constant yet progressively grand crescendo were the perfect soundtrack to witness the magic: as the light passed in front of the garments, their colours changed. Bright and vivid shades, large polka-dot patterns and Anrealage's logo suddenly appeared.

Suits with boxy silhouettes, dresses with a '50s flair about them, trench and teddy coats mutated. The accessories – including furry wigs (or were those cloche hats?) and shoes (made in collaboration with Recouture) – also changed colour.

Compared to previous collections, this was the first time Morinaga integrated the technology into a variety of textiles, comprising faux fur, velvet, lace, knits, jacquards, satins and macramé.

Further textile interventions were carried on a crocheted cape matched with crocheted mitts and an allover lace jumpsuit that, from white became multi-coloured. The effect was also fun and called to mind those magic colouring books for kids in which, as soon as the pre-coloured drawing touches a drop of water, the white areas turn from boring white to brightly coloured.

The collection showed great progress when it came to colours, as the designer pushed photochromic technology to new levels: Morinaga's palette has definitely enriched, becoming more vibrant.

He is now able to produce shades of candy tones and pastels, pinks, yellows and blues and more vivid patterns, like the vertical and horizontal green stripes on a yellow dress.

The designs also revealed in their exaggerated volumes, conceptual tailoring (think two sets of lapels and what the designer called "front/front" or "back/back" constructions) and occasional sculpted silhouettes and proportions, Morinaga's pattern-cutting skills.

Through the collection, Morinaga explored the concept of Umwelt, a 19th-century concept developed by the German philosopher and biologist Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll, indicating that the environmental factors are capable of affecting the behaviour of an animal or individual.

This is a reference to the fact that the colours of the garments will be different according to their environment: the reaction depends indeed from the particular weather conditions to which they are exposed.

So, under the sun in Rome you may get an effect, in London another and in Tokyo another one; and, obviously, colours will also be different under artificial light. This concept is interpreted by Morinaga as a celebration of diversity as well, we are indeed all one race, the designer highlighted in the collection press notes, but we see the world differently. 

This constant metamorphosis refers to the influence of the environment on the wearer, but also to the perceptions of the single individuals.

While the metamorphoses in the show were powerful, they can be considered as the natural developments of other textile experiments occurred in the history of fashion.

A few years ago, designs made with photochromic material that altered their colours when exposed to UV light, were included in Alexander Wang's A/W 2014 collection, but there is a designer who pioneered the concept - Cinzia Ruggeri (we often mentioned her in connection with Anrealage's collections).

The Italian designer included in her Spring/Summer 1982 collection a black skirt suit with sections integrating liquid crystal serigraphic prints in primary colours that, when hit by the light gave the impression they were moving. "Inspired by the projection machine created by Piero Fogliati and pondering on the creative possibilities offered by the optical phenomenon, I designed this kinetic dress based on the principle of the decomposition of colors," Ruggeri stated at the time about this design (drawing on the left in the last image in this post).

She also came up with a design that featured a pattern made with liquid crystals graduated at a certain temperature. When the temperature changed, they reacted producing different colours.

"This design, which at first glance appears black, can change its appearance thanks to the liquid crystals applied on the textiles," Ruggeri explained in 1982.

"The liquid crystals assume bright colours thanks to the temperature. I designed this textile intervention so that the body could have a greater aesthetic responsibility in the creation of colours and embellishments. This technology (…) is destined to evolve in other sectors beyond fashion," she concluded.

The concept actually evolved in other industries as predicted: as the years passed, Ruggeri was indeed also contacted by Japanese companies that wanted to apply this technique to windsurf sails.

Ruggeri actually held a patent for this textile material that incorporated a composition of cholesteric liquid crystals, the colour of which varied on varying the temperature or the visual angle under which the surface was observed.

Morinaga has reached the completion of what Ruggeri wrote in the '80s, "A garment is a changing and ephemeral entity and passes on different messages when it is worn by different individuals."

In the case of Anrealage's new collection, the garments will also communicate something different in accordance with the light of the place where the wearer is moving.

So, this early '80s concept of garments that can mutate with light has  transformed and mutated in our days, just like Morinaga's designs on Anrealage's stage.

A Laboratory of Fashion: The Institut Français de la Mode (IFM) Master's Students @ Paris Fashion Week

In the last few years we have often seen some institutions offering fashion and design courses being pumped up by the media. Yet, we have also seen these schools producing graduates concentrating their creative efforts on conceptual collections that maybe pleased the celebrity their school managed to place in the front row, but didn't display great tailoring skills nor any talent for textile interventions. Despite its fame, the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM) in Paris hasn't instead appeared so much on fashion publications and sites, nor its graduates were ever praised as "the next big thing". But, maybe, this aspect allowed its students to focus on their work without feeling the pressures of the media and concentrate on developing intriguing textile experiments.

The current IFM is the result of the 2019 merger between the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne (ECSCP), founded in 1927, and the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM), founded by Pierre Bergė in 1986. When the merger occurred, the institution, that preserved the name IFM, announced it aimed at becoming the world's "best fashion school" and rival more famous academies such as Central St Martins.

Four years after that merger, its promise of becoming not one among the many fashion schools, but "the best one", may becoming a reality, as proved by the runway for the IFM's Master of Arts program that on Monday kicked off Paris Fashion Week.

The MA program reunites two souls - the school's fashion management course and the artisanal tradition of the Chambre Syndicale school - and this was clear from the designs on the runway.

Comprising collections created by 25 international students graduating in fashion design and knitwear, the Paris runway was very focused on materials and textile elaborations, while tackling at the same time themes such as sustainability and inclusivity.

The opening designs - cute and frilly tiered and ruffled knitted mini-dresses of the sort you may see on British artist Grayson Perry - looked innocent, naive and cute. Yet, looking better in some cases they revealed disquieting images and motifs.

Created with the support of yarn manufacturer Loro Piana, the collection by French-Chilean student Shanon Poupard featured whimsical dresses with jacquard renditions of black warplanes dropping bombs over a field of flowers, nuclear explosions and bomb-shaped bags with lit fuses. These decorative elements added an ominous aura to the collection.

"My collection studies the infantilization of reality as we respond to current traumas such as war and climate crisis," the young designer commented in her collection statement.

Shanon Poupard is a winner of the 2022 Loro Piana Knit Design Award 2022 that she shared with another IFM graduate, Po Chieh Chiu, who created for this show braided and ribbed sweaters matched with bleached bubble knits print denim pants. Granny square tiles were also reinvented in this collection and employed to create a sort of fractal effect on a sweater.

Among the graduates, there was also a consistent contingent of South Korean students: Eugene Oh recreated with denim elements from Elizabethan costumes, such as elaborate trellis-like stitching incorporating pearls and a denim doublet matched with a finely pleated miniskirt (a micro version of Elizabethan canions - that is, breeches).

His 3D printed armour dress with knitted inserts was instead a collaboration with another graduate, Tatjana Haupt, who currently designs knitwear at Kenzo and who provided the knitwear pieces for this collection.

Gookhyun Lee developed a collection entitled "Romantic Army" with exaggerated tailored details and pastel prints. His suits seemed to have a feminine twist about them, but the designer built around the shoulders gigantic robotic see-through structures or pointed spikes, elements that distorted the silhouette. All the models were wearing or carrying metal helmets.

The emphasis on the shoulders was a reference to authority maybe, and the helmets reminded people that South Korean men must spend two years as army conscripts (fashion graduates included).

Chaewon Song focused on dresses that incorporated rows of three-dimensional loops that created a dynamically optical effect around the bodies of the model, almost a glitch distortion.    

Italian Cristian Rocco Rizzo was inspired instead by interior design and upholstery: crocheted pants were assembled from a selection of doilies; a sweater was decorated with metres of tassel fringes that looked like leftovers from an upholstery shop (the course requires to develop sustainable practices); the torn fabric on a padded pink damask coat revealed a sofa underneath; the sleeves of another design came in deep shades of green and blue velvet that looked as if they had been ripped off an armchair.

Rather than punk studs, a jacket incorporated upholstery tacks and, on a linen pillow case decorated with gigliuccio embroidery, the young designer left a message to summarise the collection – "I built a home for you and me".

Blynda Chen embellished her jackets and trousers with hundreds of fabric holly-like leaves, some of them forming geometrical motifs; Justine Junot developed knitted silk armours of braided elements. The graduate calls these elements forming intricate swirls around the body (created with the support of Italian textile manufacturer Servizi e Seta) snakes.

Eun Pyo Hong closed the show with her wedding dresses made from knitted filigree lace inspired by 16th-century Dutch paintings and costumes, some of them multi-layered like a cake and incorporating cartwheel ruffles made with Emilicotoni's TPU yarn, a silicon-covered cotton yarn that, heat-pressed can become stiffer. As the looks were rather time-consuming to make, Bettina Sam, a knitting atelier in Monaco, offered Hong some help.

Tecnically speaking, one of the best collection was Ju Bao's: entitled "Annihilation" it featured several garments and items that looked as if they were made of faded and decayed denim, but they were actually made with a laddered knitwear technique Bao invented and made with Sato Seni yarns.

Reaching this level is not easy, but ten IFM students a year get one-to-one tutoring from highly-experienced knitwear designer Adam Jones (Director of Knitwear for both Master in Art and Bachelor in Art program at IFM; he worked at Kenzo before becoming the director of knitwear for Christian Dior) and also have access to advanced machinery.

As a whole, the runway showed there's hope, but also proved that younger generations have been impacted by the dark times we are all living in (see the bombs and echoes of the war mixed with sugary moods) and that they are also willing to learn time-consuming techniques if they are passionate about what they are doing.

There were certainly some graduates who did better than others, but two winning points emerged from this runway: IFM fosters teamwork and collaborations and students are usually matched with a company or manufacturer that will help them developing their textile elaborations. The former pushed graduates in different disciplines to work together (pattern-cutting and accessory students who worked with the fashion graduates were also credited in the footnotes of each collection). Working with a company, and learning more about what goes on in a factory, allowed the graduates to develop innovative designs and elevate their collections (but learning about materials and techniques from a company may also help students understanding better which path they would like to take in future and if they would like to work "behind the scenes" of the industry, which can be an equally exciting job).

For the time being, though, the road is still long for them: after this joyous moment, they will have to go back to work on the rest of their graduation collection, present it to a jury of professionals, write a research thesis, and do a six-month internship at a French fashion house. By now they will have learnt that fashion never stops.