MANIFESTO
After working in fashion e-commerce for years I've come to the conclusion that in e-commerce we do not sell clothes... we sell images of clothes. Compressed, digital versions of physical products. As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, a product image is a symbol or metaphor of a product. Media--in this case images--mediates the space between customer and product; viewer and object. Images can be altered, changed, corrupted, photoshopped, edited, deleted, or imagined. E-commerce products (or e-commerce photos) can thought of as a possibility space of digital pixels. AI/ML can analyze, manipulate, and create within this "possibility space of pixels"--thus it can be observed that there are opportunities to intervene in the physical fashion world through the imagination of artificial intelligence. Not to replace human creativity--but to augment it. To make it ART-ificial. Art is an artificial representation of reality. AI images are an artificial representation of reality. The sewing machine greatly increased the efficiency of clothing production. Similarly, AI has greatly increased efficiency image production, in our case product photo production. The fashion design paradigm of the past century (design->produce->photograph) has been flipped on this head. Instead of going from physical clothing to digital image via photography--we can go from digital image to physical clothing via stable diffusion. We are writing the chapter of Understanding Media that Marshall McLuhan never imagined. Virtual production hasn't replaced the physical production; it has simply made it out of style.
