All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Late last year, I visited Outlier designer Willie Norris at her Brooklyn studio. After she walked me through her collection, she told me she had something cool to show me. Like any decent reporter—and curious person—I was more than down to check it out. Turns out Norris had partnered with the artist Zak Krevitt to interpret the images for her spring 2023 lookbook through the lens of AI—yes, artificial intelligence. Krevitt turned Norris’s models into fantastical otherworldly beings: Aliens walking down a runway in menswear of fantastical proportions—it was as if a Vogue Runway lookbook and a surrealist painting were put in a blender.
A few weeks later, I connected with Krevitt on Instagram. Norris had produced blankets of these AI illustrations, and as I shared one online Krevitt popped up in my DMs to claim his artwork—as he should! We started chatting. Like many, I had seen all the controversy about AI online, but was curious about how it worked. Krevitt explained many things I’m unable to eloquently spell out here: Codes, custom AI models, image databases, the math in data science. What I took from our conversation is that AI, as scary as it sounds—everything from Scarlett Johansson in Her to Wall-E to I, Robot come to mind—is an opportunity to process images and data. It’s here whether we like it or not, so why not try to understand it?
Here’s what we did: Krevitt and I spoke when the men’s shows were getting under way, and we saw an opportunity to create an AI trend report of sorts. As I do every menswear season, I started tracking trends from the moment the first look at the first show walked down the runway, and once the Runway team and I had landed on a finalized list, Krevitt fed the model he created all of our images: Going out tops, sheaths, hefty jackets, new athleisure, reimagined office wear…
My Vogue Runway report features nine trends that dominated the fall 2023 menswear season; what Krevitt generated are 11 looks that synthesize the collections. Yes, 11 entirely new looks created through AI based on all the data we collected from the menswear season.
“There’s a misconception that AI art and AI image generation is a collage that takes parts of existing images and places them somewhere else,” Krevitt says. “But that’s not what is happening. What we did is that, with a custom model, we taught the AI a new thing. The first step is a blurry noise pattern, and each step draws little connections between those pixels in a process that the AI thinks might be right.” To put in plainly: Krevitt created a custom model based on the runway collections and our ideal, photorealistic output. “All of the pixels that are drawn are totally novel based on all the information that you give it,” he adds. To put it even more plainly: “It’s like if I went to all of these fashion shows and stared at each model coming down the runway really hard, and then a week later I took pen and pencil and drew them from memory,” surely the drawings wouldn’t look like the collections, but they’d encapsulate what they’re about: Silhouettes, proportions, fabrications, drape.
Krevitt understands the questions around AI—and the collective anxiety. But trust, this is not a replacement of a trend report, nor is it an attempt to supplant anyone’s editorial eye with an AI. “What we’ve done together is more an exploration of data science than it is necessarily fashion,” he says. If there’s anything a fashion watcher can tell you, it’s that there is nothing like the real thing—that’s what keeps us coming back to the shows each season. “We’ve taken data points from the runway and essentially put them into a mathematical model and said, hey, let’s explore this,” Krevitt adds. “But of course it’s not going to have the same soul and heart and spirit of something that was cut and sewn and then worn by a person.”
In my opinion, nothing ever will.
Scroll through to see the fall 2023 menswear season as interpreted by Krevitt and an AI.
