Towards Co-Creative Generative Adversarial Networks for Fashion Designers

Originating from the premise that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) enrich creative processes rather than diluting them, we describe an ongoing PhD project that proposes to study GANs in a co-creative context. By asking How can GANs be applied in co-creation, and in doing so, how can they contribute to fashion design processes? the project sets out to investigate co-creative GAN applications and further develop them for the specific application area of fashion design. We do so by drawing on the field of mixed-initiative co-creation. Combined with the technical insight into GANs' functioning, we aim to understand how their algorithmic properties translate into interactive interfaces for co-creation and propose new interactions.Comment: Published at GenAICHI, CHI 2022 Worksho

Fashion Style Generation: Evolutionary Search with Gaussian Mixture Models in the Latent Space

This paper presents a novel approach for guiding a Generative Adversarial Network trained on the FashionGen dataset to generate designs corresponding to target fashion styles. Finding the latent vectors in the generator's latent space that correspond to a style is approached as an evolutionary search problem. A Gaussian mixture model is applied to identify fashion styles based on the higher-layer representations of outfits in a clothing-specific attribute prediction model. Over generations, a genetic algorithm optimizes a population of designs to increase their probability of belonging to one of the Gaussian mixture components or styles. Showing that the developed system can generate images of maximum fitness visually resembling certain styles, our approach provides a promising direction to guide the search for style-coherent designs.Comment: - to be published at: International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design : EvoMUSART 2022 - typo corrected in abstrac