I love reading the New York Times. So it was with fascination and amusement that I scrolled through its recent coverage of Milan Fashion Week… and wondered: how would GenAI at Fashion Week perform?
We begin with:
an actual photograph
Specifically, I was intrigued by this one particular (theoretically real) photograph:
I thought: well, that’s an interesting image. A picture of a model wearing a dress with a picture of a model wearing a dress? Nice linguistic nesting. Kind of like a visual riddle. I bet that there’s just no way the leading AI art engines (MidJourmey, DALL-E 3 and StableDiffusion) will ever be able to untangle a prompt for this one.
So, not thinking much about wording it too precisely, I hopped on into Discord and typed
the prompt to MidJourney:
/imagine: “full body photograph of a 36 year old asian model wearing a pink dress that is screen printed with a vintage picture of a model wearing a pink dress, and wearing a large pop art black pendant necklace, street photography, bright sunlight, fashion photography, tight depth of field”
12 seconds later, zero-shot:
MidJourney, as it is, always give 4 options.
This was its second offering:
All good.
Amazing, in fact. I mean, hell… the engine didn’t even blink, or stutter. It got the “picture of a pink dress printed on a pink dress” without me even having to adjust the prompt once.
Color me impressed.
Pushing GenAI at Fashion Week
But… on closer inspection, I did notice a bit of user error, due to either laziness of fashion, skepticism, or both on my part. I had forgotten the red purse, and I had not properly described the awesome “bunny skull and crossbones” necklace (nor the clever climbing carabiner choker) that she was wearing. So, hope against hope, I added even more convoluted detail to the already lengthy prompt:
/imagine: full body photograph of a 36 year old asian model wearing a pink dress that is screen printed with a vintage picture of a model wearing a pink dress. she sports a large pop art black pendant in the shape of a bunny with crossbones behind it. she has a red patent leather purse slung tightly across her shoulder. a second choker necklace is secured in front with a climbing caribiner. street photography, bright sunlight, fashion photography, nikon, tight depth of field
aaaaand…
Voila!
Wow.
I gotta say it: