A new cadre of supes has been spawned via technology: image generation .
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Women’s clothing and accessory brand Anne Klein has started using AI-generated images of real models for product images on its site and social media.
AI.Fashion , a Los Angeles-based startup founded by ex-Googler Daniel Citron, who now serves as its CEO, made that possible for the brand. One of its AI-powered products, called Persona, allows brands to connect with real-life models, then pay them for the use of their digital likenesses in campaigns.
Tisha Jacobson is one of those models. Earlier this year, she uploaded images of herself to the Persona platform. WHP Global decided to use her likeness for its test run with Persona, and Jacobson accepted the deal. Jacobson said so far Anne Klein has created about 30 images using her digital likeness. The brand, which is owned by WHP Global , is one of several in the firm’s portfolio trialing the technology.
Throughout the process, Jacobson said she had the chance to review tester images and share her thoughts.
“It’s such a wild experience to see yourself in a photo that you know you didn’t take. When I was offered the opportunity to work with WHP, I got to see a few aesthetic samples of how I would look with the chance to provide feedback on resemblance, aesthetic and makeup,” Jacobson told Sourcing Journal.
For Doug Weiss, senior vice president of digital, e-commerce and AI for WHP, AI-generated images make sense because they cut costs and increase representation and variety.
“Photography and photo shoots and the like are significant expenses across our portfolio and also often don’t give us necessarily all the flexibility and variety that we might want,” Weiss said. “One of the great things about AI is that it gives you more flexibility to be able to do more with either the same resources or slightly less.”
Though it’s too early to gauge the exact cost savings brought about by the partnership, he expects the benefits to be threefold: reducing the number of shots that need to be taken
in a physical studio; avoiding the cost of incremental shoots for international partners of Anne Klein and creating more content that represents a broader swath of the brand’s core customer group.
Financial benefit may be a primary reason brands begin to adopt technologies like Persona, but Weiss said WHP strategically selected AI.Fashion because of its commitment to keeping human models in the loop, even if the process looks different than it once did.
“We obviously want to continue to invest in the broader fashion community, and this gives us a way to make sure that we are continuing to support a variety of people who obviously rely on this industry,” he said. “The beauty of fashion is this combination of the human touch [and] art. In many ways, this is just another iteration of that. In the end, people wear fashion to feel like someone, and it just feels a little foreign for that someone to not actually exist.”
With Persona, the WHP creative team has the ability to tweak images generated by Persona exactly to their liking; Weiss said the company took advantage of that product feature to keep the images consistent with the brand aesthetics.
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Citron said AI.Fashion’s technology has specifically been designed to keep a brand’s identity at the core of every project—whether the images are meant to look like they were shot in a traditional studio or on the streets of a tropical destination.
“Brands have spent years, sometimes decades, building up their unique aesthetic. That might be the way that they pose their models, it might be the way they shoot the scenes, the way their clothing is presented,” Citron told Sourcing Journal. “We want to make sure that for WHP and for Anne Klein, that the images that they produce feel unique to their brands and don’t feel generic.”
In Anne Klein’s case, the AI.Fashion team worked closely with the creative team to alter the lighting in the first round of images it produced. Weiss said originally the lighting looked a little too generic as compared with Anne Klein’s usual style.
“One of the things that we’ve done over the last two years [at Anne Klein], is really try to elevate the brand and make it feel more luxury—more soft lighting, very polished while also being representative of the professional women. One of the things we worked on fairly extensively [with AI.Fashion]…was the lighting—making it a little softer, a little bit less direct, a little bit less [focused] on the face,” he explained.
While Weiss said only a small percentage of Anne Klein’s current product listings include images generated by the Persona product, he and his team plan to scale that up as the company prepares to launch its fall-winter collection later this year.
In the future, the company plans to use AI- generated digital likenesses across its portfolio of brands, which includes G-Star Raw, Bonobos, Express, Rag & Bone and more.
Persona allows anyone—whether a famous model, someone breaking into the arena or someone who has never modeled before—to upload their images to the platform. For Citron, that enables the company to provide a trove of options to brands.
“When you try to sell any item of clothing, often [brands] are limited to like one, maybe two models to showcase the clothing, which means that just most people don’t get to see the products in their size, on a model that might represent or look like them,” he said. “One of the things I think brands are so excited about [with] our product, is we really enable them to—in a cost-effective way—be able to showcase their product across a huge amount of sizes and different model types and different backgrounds and ethnicities.”
And for models like Jacobson, who have already been matched with brands, the platform provides a way to make passive income, she said. While she has thus far only worked with Anne Klein through Persona, she said she would welcome the chance to work with other brands in the future.
Though she acknowledged that “everyone on some level has concerns about the safety
of their identity and how it’ll be impacted by AI going into the future,” she said she doesn’t have hesitations over the way Persona uses her digital likeness and explained that the benefits she has received from the process thus far have shown her its value.
“I think the most interesting benefit has been the opportunity to connect with large brands that I may not otherwise have been connected with. Given the unique nature of this type of modeling, I feel like there’s honestly more room for growth in a field that isn’t quite as oversaturated as the ‘IRL’ modeling world is, which feels like a genuinely weird sentence to say.”
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