Online e-commerce startup Vue.ai has released AI technology that analyses clothing and automatically generates an image of the garment on a person of any size, shape, and skin colour. The company, we have learned, is currently liaising with retailers to replace the continuous stream of photo shoots for each new run of clothing or collection.

All that’s required from the retailer is to take the photo of the garment stretched evenly on a surface and set the required outputs. The program will then produce a ‘catalogue’ image of the virtual model ‘wearing’ the apparel of choice.

This software is yet another step in the employment of the artificial intelligence in the fashion industry. The VR fashions shows are so 2016!

The technology, developed by Vue.ai uses a machine learning approach called generative adversarial networks, or GANs. The system has two AIs: a generator and a critic. The generator tries to make an image that looks good, and the critic decides if it looks good enough. GANs are a relatively new concept, credited to Google’s Ian Goodfellow in 2014, and work ‘especially well’ generating images.

Vue.ai is now working with North American retailers to implement this technology; Vue.ai can’t say what companies it is working with, but you might have already seen one of its AI-generated creations.

The software is seen as an extremely cost-effective solution for brands with a great variety of garments. For catalogue models, it may mean that finding next gig might become even harder in near future. As to the model agencies, it will likely result in much tougher competition. Model Agencies might be expected to invest more in personal brand and presence of models in mainstream media and social media if they still want to be charging a premium for their ‘life capital’. Unless, of course, they want to embark on the journey of ‘AI model agency’, lifespan and daily going on of which is hard to predict at the moment.