December Creative Class: Using AI to Design Christmas Fashion

Wiki Article

As an art and design teacher at a high school, I'm always looking for ways to make learning more relevant to rapidly developing technology and industry. This year's December creative class became a breakthrough moment when I integrated AI into the fashion design curriculum. The results exceeded expectations, students not only learned design concepts but also gained exposure to professional tools used in the modern fashion industry.

Challenges of Teaching Traditional Fashion Design

For many years, the curriculum for fashion design in our school has remained relatively unchanged. Students learn manual sketching, color theory, fabric selection via textbooks and creating physical mood boards. This is an essential foundation for fashion designers, but there seems to be a disconnect between what students learn in class versus the current digitalization of the fashion industry.

One of the most significant issues is the visual barrier. Students may be able to sketch their designs on paper; however, it can be difficult for many of them (especially those still developing their drawing skills) to picture how their design will actually appear when worn by models with various body types and skin tones and in different poses. This frustration often leads to disillusionment among students who may be very creative and have developed excellent creative concepts.

Resource limitations are also a significant obstacle for schools. It is unrealistic for schools to provide fabric, mannequins, and sewing machines for every student to create garments from scratch, especially considering that seasonal fashion design projects (holiday fashion design) only remain in the classroom for a few weeks out of the year.

Introducing AI in Fashion Design Curriculum

This Christmas season, I implemented VISBOOM, an AI-based photo editing platform with model swap capabilities, as a key resource for my fashion project; initially, I received some push-back from coworkers regarding whether or not utilizing this tool would result in students relying too much on technology to perform the work that should have been done by them.

In actuality, the opposite was true: using AI as part of the fashion project not only allowed students to engage in a higher level of creative thinking but also helped them gain deeper insight into how to create their collections through an understanding of the relationships between textiles, colors, lines, form, function, and aesthetics.

I structured the fashion project in a straightforward way, while still being comprehensive. Each student group was given a different target market for their collection design of Christmas outfits: Formal Office Party Attire; Casual Family Gatherings; Elegant Dinner Wear; and Youth-Inspired Festive Streetwear.

Each group started the design process with traditional means of research, researching current fashion trends, color palettes, and manually creating sketch designs and mood boards; without the information acquired through the traditional method of fashion research, a foundation of concept development would not have been established.

Magic Happens: From Concept to Visualization

After finalizing design ideas, the next step involved using Visboom's AI-based visualization technology. Students submitted pictures of the outfits which come closest to their designs, either from online catalogs or fashion websites, and then utilized the model-swap tool available in Visboom to apply those outfits to models of varying physical characteristics.

This is when the change in how each student's learning changed. They suddenly had the chance to see their designs being worn by models with a variety of body shapes, skin colors, age ranges and sexes. Realizing that designs that may look incredible on one model could not look as good on a different model brings students to a higher level of understanding when it concerns inclusive design/versatility, something that is difficult to teach simply through traditional means.

Another benefit of this process is the quick ability for students to make modifications to their original designs. When students chose an inappropriate color for their original designs, the length of time required to adjust palettes went from days/weeks to only minutes with this technology. By having the capability to quickly repeat the cycle of testing and drawing conclusions, students were able to engage in more experimentation, to fail faster and to learn much faster in their studies.

Beyond Technical Skills: Critical Thinking Development

What's most valuable about this project is how it encourages critical thinking and analytical skills. Students had to articulate WHY certain design choices worked or didn't work. They had to defend their color selections, fabric choices, and styling decisions with evidence, actual visual demonstrations using Visboom outputs.

Class presentations became incredibly rich. Students showcased side-by-side comparisons, demonstrating their thought processes in refining designs. Peer feedback was also more constructive because everyone could clearly see what was being discussed.

Preparing Students for the Real Industry

I received very positive feedback from guest judges who were all industry professionals I invited. They were impressed with the students' level of understanding of not only aesthetics but also business aspects such as segmentation of markets, analysis of target demographics, and versatility in design.

Some of these students continued using AI fashion design tools after completing their classroom assignments. They created very professional and sophisticated looking portfolios for themselves. The students developed their portfolios much quicker than they could have if they were to develop their portfolios by hand over an extended period in the traditional manner.

The use of AI tools like Visboom in fashion design education is not a method for taking shortcuts or replacing traditional skill development; rather, it provides students with a way to use powerful tools to explore their creativity more deeply and provide them with the ability to iterate more quickly, thus developing the type of critical thinking that aligns with industry practices today. The results of the project proved that technology integrated well into an educational environment can improve the outcomes of educational programs significantly. I anticipate next semester; I will be able to expand my integration of AI into many other areas of the Creative Arts Curriculum; my opportunities in this area are essentially endless.