As Chanel contends with a Virginie Viard-shaped hole in the wake of the artistic director’s departure, Joor is filling the gap, at least conceptually, with a digital flight of fancy.
On Friday, the digital wholesale platform dropped a set of images created by generative AI that imagines what potential successors could bring to the French luxury brand. The creative exercise posited, “What Would Karl say?”, a nod to Chanel legend Karl Lagerfeld, Viard’s predecessor.
The internet’s been abuzz about which high-profile designers could be contenders for Chanel’s top creative role. So the fashion experts at Joor used generative AI to study their signature styles, as well as the codes of the house, and visualize how they might come together. Joor used Openart.ai, a text-to-image AI tool, to generate the fictional outfits.
The hypothetical lineup features Phoebe Philo, formerly of Celine; Hedi Slimane, Celine’s current creative director; Pierpaolo Piccioli, former Valentino creative director; Sarah Burton, previously of Alexander McQueen; Haider Ackermann, newly minted creative director at Canada Goose, and Jeremy Scott.
The designers themselves weren’t involved. This is purely the brainchild of Joor, the same platform that, when it’s not touting virtual showrooms or raising gobs of money from investors, has a penchant for dipping into some of the less excavated corners of the industry — like the most misspelled brand names in fashion. (For the record, that dubious distinction goes to Adidas and Chanel.)
As tech mock-ups go, Joor’s AI did a pretty decent job of creating pseudo-realistic images using influences that appear both logical and traceable.
However, if fashion has proven anything over the years, it’s that human talent and imagination aren’t formulaic — at least not if they want to succeed. Hopefully, whoever ultimately takes the mantle at Chanel can go beyond what machines can do and offer collections that defy expectations instead.
