The application created by Huawei elaborated the images of fashion across the past century and proposed sketches to the creative director of the Annakiki brand
The fashion collection was conceived thanks to the use of a smartphone based on artificial intelligence. What a collection. And what a smartphone. The designer is Anna Yang, Creative Director and founder of the Annakiki brand, which in recent years has been considered a “must” at Fashion Week. The smartphone in question is the P30 by Huawei, the top of the line for the Chinese manufacturer and one of the most advanced cell phones in the world in terms of functions, especially for photography. Fashion Flair is the name of the experimental app created by Huawei with the support of a team of Italian developers, who mixed the height of creativity with the height of technology to create a truly exclusive fashion collection.
“Trained” with tens of thousands of images of fashion from the past 100 years and a specific set of photographs from the most recent collections by Annakiki, the app used the double unit of neural calculation in the two P30 and P30 Pro (the super-advanced version) models to elaborate the acquired images and data and create original outfits, or digital “sketches” that Anna Yang worked on to conceive her new collection of 20 pieces. “In this project, I experimented with something that has never been done: drawing inspiration from artificial intelligence – says Anna Yang. To co-create was extremely stimulating and I am certain that in the future, technology will play a more distinctive role in the world of fashion, opening completely new scenarios that we can only imagine at this point. This capsule collection is but one example of what it will be possible to do in the future! On her part, Isabella Lazzini, Marketing & Retail Director of Huawei Cbg Italia explains that artificial intelligence is already here:
Providing the base parameters for the development of a garment, such as colour, length, volume and texture, artificial intelligence can give designers a creative inspiration from which to start to develop their creations.
Technology and smartphones are part of our lives, so why not make them an additional source of inspiration? That is what we did with the “Fashion Flair” project, and we are enthusiastic about it”. Davide Bacciu, Professor in the Computer Learning Department at the University of Pisa and a member of the Directive Committee of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (Aixia) explains that “the synthetic images generated by the app will represent options that are stylistically coherent with the examples used to train the software, but with greater characteristics of originality. In other words, the images generated by the web may be considered for all intents and purposes to be new information invented by the artificial neural network. In this scenario, which is of great interest, Fashion Flair appears as the first (public) example of an artificial neural network that is used interactively by a fashion designer to create, and in the long run, to develop, a fashion garment”.
Anna Yang’s new collection looked to the Huawei colour palette to find the colours used for the covers of the two P30 smartphone models, in another source of inspiration. Some of the most representative outfits in the collection reflect the bright colours used by Huawei: Amber Sunrise, Breathing Crystal, Aurora and Black, from the warm colours of dawn to the more intense and relaxing colours of the aurora to the delicate sparkling salt flats that stretch to the heavens to finally reach the darkness of the night. “While it is true that algorithms, neuroscience and cybernetics are increasingly part of the fashion world, it is the short-circuit of creativity that, in conjunction with increasingly advanced technology, can lead to a new ideal of beauty”, concludes the fashion historian and university professor Sofia Gnoli.
The entire Annakiki collection for Huawei may be purchased online and pre-ordered at the LuisaViaRoma.com store (the online partner for the project). Part of the proceeds will be used to fund a special project to support young talents at one of the major Fashion Design academies in Italy.
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translation by Olga Barmine
