Facebook's New App Fashion++ Wants To Tell You What To Wear

by SHOWstudio on 26 September 2019

Fashion++ is the artificial intelligence system predicting a bleak future for personal style.

Fashion++ is the artificial intelligence system predicting a bleak future for personal style.

Fashion++ is a new artificial intelligence system developed by Facebook that offers fashion advice to the user, suggesting tweaks and changes to how you've styled your outfit through scanning its inventory of 'fashionable' data, including images and human opinion.

Announced in a Facebook online paper, Fashion++ illustrates how AI can be used in creative fields, countering current wisdom that suggests artificial intelligence will never replace the individual, opinion-led nature of human creativity. The app aims not to dictate good taste, but to compare a user's input image of their outfit to prior examples - either of their own style, or of style influencers - applying automated metrics in order to suggest styling improvements.

Facebook suggests that Fashion++ could prove to serve both consumer and designer, providing a 'more democratic' way to create looks and assess the visual impact of an outfit. Devi Parikh, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and FAIR researcher who worked on the project, told Vogue Business: 'Technology is democratising creativity, and this tool can be for users who are at different points on the spectrum of [style] expertise.' Certainly, there have been calls for tech to help you get dressed, since Cher's computerised wardrobe in 1994 film Clueless.

Having said that, however, the promise of fashion democracy through AI is tempered with the question: who gets to decide what is 'fashionable' or not? Which data has been selected to determine between 'stylish' and 'needs work'? Styling gains its power from the unexpected juxtaposition of clothes worn in unconventional ways. Given that the app bases its recommendations on existing images, will personal fashion quirks be ironed out in favour of reiterating existing images? Could this prevent personal style and fashion as a whole from evolving? Personal style can be empowering, in that it provides the tools for self-expression, but ultimately, Fashion++ could reduce personal style to a formulaic model made up of algorithms: if you're being told what to wear by an app, the power of self-expression is null and void.

Last Sunday at the close of Milan Fashion Week, Gucci's S/S 20 collection, New Forms Of Subjectification, attempted to illustrate the ability of fashion to both enforce and resist social normativity. As the Gucci press release says, fashion should be '...a space of poetical self-affirmation where the desire of the self can shine.' Fashion++ presents a new concern that it'll rob clothes-wearers of the future of their own opinions when it comes to style.

Explore

Series

AI Means Love in Chinese

01 November 2023
SHOWstudio's ongoing project explores AI’s ability to match human creativity through conversations hosted by Nick Knight.
Conversation

Conversation: Discussing AI with visual artist Memo Akten

18 June 2019
What does artificial intelligence mean for the human experience, and where do the technology’s limitations lie?
Back to top