Fashion schools vs. AI
We asked educators around the world how they're keeping up with the technology and its impact on students' work.
Fur is no longer en vogue
Condé Nast has banned fur in adverts and editorials across every title, meaning, most significantly, no more fur in Vogue (but also GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair…). Another departure from the Anna Wintour era? Or maybe more to do with a nine-month campaign by the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT) that involved protestors picketing the houses of Vogue’s editors and demonstrating outside events, according to CNN. Next do fake fur?
A new film about Kate Moss
Moss and Freud, a film about the model and the artist’s encounter 20 years ago that resulted in a world-famous nude portrait, premiered at London Film Festival this week. While the real painting may be excellent, the film is not, according to The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, who gave it 2/5 stars and describes it as “careful, legacy-controlling blandness.” Unsurprising, really, it’s never a good sign when the subject of the film is given an executive producer credit.
Thomas Tait’s ballet costumes
The talented CSM grad and once-upon-a-time LFW designer has been keeping a low profile for a while, working behind the scenes of the industry. So, we’re very happy to see him presenting a new project over the weekend, as the costume designer for a modernist ballet in Vienna.
Campaign of the week
Bret Easton Ellis photographed by David Sims for Stone Island. Love.
Job and work opportunities
New York brand Melitta Baumeister are offering three-month internships. Email your portfolio and resume to atelier@melittabaumeister.com
London-based record label Young (The xx, Robyn, Sampha…) are hiring a social media content creator. The deadline’s 24 October. More info here
By Thom Waite
By now, it’s no secret that AI is poised to upend education, if it hasn’t already. And why wouldn’t it? Graduates are heading out into a world that is, increasingly, shaped (or ‘disrupted’) by artificial intelligence itself. Plugging written assignments into ChatGPT or turning to a bot to critique your design work is often dismissed as a quick and easy shortcut, but could equally be seen as a desperate attempt to keep up with new innovations. This begs the question: how are education institutions themselves actually facilitating this effort? How are fashion schools, specifically, dealing with a technology that’s set to impact the industry to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in years to come – a tool that simultaneously complicates the values that many young designers hold dear, like craftsmanship, creativity, and sustainability?
In an attempt to answer this question, we consulted educators from fashion schools across the world, including London’s Central Saint Martins (CSM), London College of Fashion (LCF) and Istituto Marangoni, Parsons School of Design in NYC, Institut Français de la Mode (IFM) in Paris, and Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts. A recurring theme? It’s a “wild west” out there. But what does that actually look like, in practice?
Like any educational issue, it begins with the students. In recent years, fashion students have increasingly adopted AI tools, as the technology enters the mainstream and grows more accessible. “I’ve definitely noticed more students experimenting with AI tools to support their coursework,” says Istituto Marangoni London’s director of education, Adi Maoz-Cohen, while IFM’s Giovanna Casimiro says that the uptake is practically “unanimous… all students are using AI in some capacity”. That doesn’t mean that the outlook on AI is the same across the board, though. Tim Stock, a teaching professor at Parsons, notes that he sees students using AI tools in “very different” ways. “Some turn to it for efficiency, drafting text or producing quick visuals, others use it as a way to test boundaries and see how a system interprets their intent or references.” The most successful uses, he says, come from the latter: engaging with AI in a critical way, students question their own biases and come to see their work in a different light.