Latest Etro campaign use AI for creativity-meets-tech imagery

Etro may be best known for its amazing use of colour and pattern rather than a futuristic approach to fashion but its new campaign certainly embraces the latest technology, making creative use of artificial intelligence.

We’re told the SS24 campaign “brings the idea of Nowhere, a place only possible to the imagination and which served as the inspiration for the SS24 collection, to a further level of expression”. 

For this, Creative Director Marco De Vincenzo collaborated with digital artist and designer Silvia Badalotti in order to create “a series of scenes and depictions through artificial intelligence”.

Etro said it’s “a work that arises from the dialogue between two creatives and between a creative and the machine – the result of which is only possible with the collaboration of all parties”.

The visual end point of this is a selection of “synthetic images, emerging from the interaction between the human and the mechanical” as Badalotti “leads AI through infinite possible scenarios and environments” in conjunction with De Vincenzo.

The company has used AI to both replicate and enhance the print for which it’s known, saying: “Like a painting but replacing brushes and colours with pixels and screen visions. The scenarios are made up, as are the bodies: physical and spatial utopias, beyond biology and beyond logic. The energy from which they are born and which pervades them is human. The basic principle is the same as fashion, an activity through which each body determines a new mantle for itself: the combinations of elements are virtually unbounded.”

AI has created “starry skies and astral maps [that] become closed environments, while… unspeakable vegetation grows in the greenhouses and all the scenes are populated by a humanity that is both familiar and alien, telling short and extraordinary tales of infinite genetic conjunctions”.

It’s one of number of campaign releases this season using AI. Many of them use the tech to place a particular brand’s collection into an unusual location; to place an exaggerated version of an item into such a location; or place an unusual figure/prop into an everyday scene.