Soorty is digging its heels into artificial intelligence.
Building off the digital fashion collection presented at Kingpins Amsterdam in April, the vertically integrated denim manufacturer debuted HumAIn Chapter 2, its second AI-generated denim collection created with ORNMNTNCRM (short for Ornament & Crime), at its New York City showroom last week. Soorty brought on additional creative help—Denim Dudes founder Amy Leverton and trend forecaster Shannon Reddy—to guide trend direction.
Related Stories
The goal of the HumAIn collection is to explore how AI can revolutionize the denim industry. “AI is really good for just investigating ideas from a visual perspective,” said Volker Ketteniss, ORNMNTNCRM founder. “There’s a lot of stuff that we kind of need to rethink [regarding] what is creativity.”
The digital collection was generated with the open source AI program Stable Diffusion. To create the denim looks, the research and design process had a few rules for the AI to follow: feature raw and rinse denim only, use an old factory as a backdrop, and “leverage prompts full of contradictions” to create as many variations as possible.
“You never know what you’re going to get because the AI will never say, ‘No, that was stupid, I’m not doing that.’ It will always do something,” Ketteniss said. “And once you start playing around with that, the results can be really creative. It’s a process that you don’t really know where it’s going to take you.”
Leverton said it was fascinating to see what some garments could become through AI.
“We essentially started with one trend story and fed a bunch of images and some keywords and then got one set, and then we were kind of like, ‘Oh, what if we added these new images and that’s where it get dangerous,” she said, referring to the pitfalls of idea-overload.
Ten of the 15 pieces in the collection were brought to life at Soorty’s Pakistan-based factory in what Ebru Debbag, Soorty’s executive director, said was a challenging but exciting undertaking.
Melissa Urbina, Soorty’s design and product development manager, added that the exercise forces the design team to apply creative problem-solving skills from a technical perspective. Without precise sketches or renderings, the team is forced to experiment with the technologies available at Soorty’s facility.
Highlights in the collection include a green cast button-down top dyed with Smart Indigo, Soorty’s dye technology that replaces heavy chemicals with electrochemistry, and matching jeans with brushstroke-like details. There’s also Y2K, JNCO-inspired jeans, a tie-dyed denim pullover, twill vests and a tapered technical top.
