Artificial Intelligence Designed A Dress For 2016 Tech-Themed Met Gala

Now, machines read novels, come up with creative concepts and win rounds at extremely complex games.  What’s next for AI? Designing clothes. One machine designed a dress for last week’s Met Gala #machinemagic

Artificial intelligence entered the realm where no other had gone before: fashion. It was a daring move, since here imagination and instinct, two things that machines can’t achieve yet, are essential. The final product was an interesting nude dress for Lisa Maria Falcone, with gold and silver “bottle caps” that respected the theme of the gala “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology”. The night celebrated the new exhibit at the Met Museum that analyzes how man and machine can work together to make clothes.

Of course, the AI was coordonated by Conduit Projects  and “computational designers” Nicholas Jacobson and Jared Friedman, at the request of designer Zaldy Goco.

They used Grasshopper to gather algorithms that could design clothing, in order to code and arrange ” thousands of mirrors in 24 sizes and four colorways atop a flat grid of patterned pieces”, according to Vogue writer Elizabeth Peng. Although the AI worked on a 3D scan of Falcone’s body, it produced a piece that showed too much skin for the critics’ taste.

The team respected the theme the most, but at what cost? While a human would have understood the problem of making a dress too risky for the red carpet, a machine can’t gauge the public reaction.