One night we were hanging around in our dorm room — jamming to music and commenting on each of our tees that we were wearing. Soon we began to realize that the ways a lot of these shirts were developed were quite similar. From a tee with a large central graphic to a one with a small logo on the chest, all were either something relevant in pop culture, a loud design made to attract attention, or a unique graphic drawn up by an artist.

Humans are creatures of habit. We like to do things the proven and tried way since we know it leads to results. But fashion is an industry which is always changing. Styles that are in fashion one month are out of style another month. So companies these days employ hundreds of designers that mock up thousands of designs before settling on a few worthy designs which end up making the cut. And this process takes a long time since it’s hard for a designer to be creative and fresh while still appealing to their customer base. We thought this was a problem we could solve. So with our backgrounds in AI and Business from MIT and USC we gave it a shot.

Artificial Apparel is not just a fashion brand. To us its a re-imagination of the way we have classically designed clothes for so long. Instead of having multiple designers who create many mockups, we train an AI to do the designing for us. We teach the AI how to create new visually appealing graphics by giving it thousands of images of a theme that we like. The AI then outputs fresh, artificially generated designs which we then select for our tees. This whole process takes the AI some time to learn as effectively the AI is making up for an artist’s entire design skills in a span of a few days.

But how does it work?

We decided when creating our AI that we didn’t just want to use AI to theme an image like style transfer methods below which can apply a specific style to a picture. (result shown on the right).

Instead we wanted to generate new novel graphics which were never seen before. In doing this we settled on using GAN’s, Generative Adversarial Networks, which can take in an input of images and create new images which have never been seen before. Images that could be so realistic that a human would be fooled that they were generated by an AI.

But the main challenge for us was in creating high resolution designs for t-shirt printing purposes. To do this we developed a patent-pending process which is able to solve these challenges and create the graphics for the designs on our t-shirts.

Here’s a very early version of our AI which has generated these unique graphics below.

Set of unique images by our early AI

Look at how far it has come today!

One of our flagship designs. Kinda looks like a giraffe.

A story.

Our shirts are not just a tee with a design. But they remind us of how far AI has come. In the next decade we will see radical innovation in our lives from self-driving cars to personal robots which can do your laundry for you. With that in mind we wanted to create a line which was not only stylish but would raise intrigue from others. Artificial Apparel is a brand that we started to embody these principles. So next time you wear one of our shirts remember you aren’t just wearing a shirt designed by AI, but that you are wearing the future.

Check out all of our shirts at artificialapparel.com. They are all $25 with free shipping.