Norma Kamali embraces AI technology as her latest design muse

Despite being associated as a working fashion designer for over six decades, technically, Coco Chanel was only an active designer for roughly 46 of those years and was majority-owned by the Wertheimer’s through most of it.

Karl Lagerfeld, who designed Chanel starting in 1983 after her passing in 1971, can boast 65 years as a designer. Thus, at 57 years of solely designing her collection and owning her brand, Norma Kamali holds an esteemed place of longevity in fashion.

Always with a forward vision—to wit, her sleeping bag coat, parachute silks, fleece athleisure, and high-heeled sneakers of the 1980s and the seventies’ most famous bathing suit, the unstructured sleek style worn by Farah Fawcett—Kamali is still innovating.

To keep her brand fresh and alive, Kamali has turned to the latest technology, AI, to preserve her five-decade-plus archives. To introduce the newest member of her team, Kamali invited press, designers, and other industry OGs to her Greenwich Street headquarters to demonstrate the technology, displaying results in fashion design and art installation entitled ‘Fashion Hallucinations’.

Kamali said the project began six years ago when she visited Abu Dhabi. There, she met a scientist working on an AI project who asked Kamali to consider using budding technology to design clothes.

“They want to download my brain!” the designer said, in a video shown in the vast gallery space.

Kamali described her curiosity about using the new technology, noting that she was first introduced to computer technology when she worked on a Univac computer while working for Northwest Airlines just after graduating from F.I.T. in 1965.

“I learned then that possibilities in the technology world would be beyond my imagination,” she said.

Fast-forward almost 60 years later, the AIXNK is a full-circle example of how technology has impacted the designer’s purview. In June of 2023, Kamali enrolled in a generative AI course at MIT and, following that, reached out to Maison Meta, a creative-centric Gen Ai agency in New York.

In tandem, they fashioned a proprietary tool that references Kamala’s 57-year archive and draws any of its cues only from Kamali’s body of work. As she has been the sole designer of her collections and created the AI cues, the tool, in theory, is designing new styles in the purest form.

To demonstrate, Kamali had on display a popular black and sheer spliced dress recently worn by Jessica Biel. In revisiting the dress, Kamali designed a jumpsuit but wanted to add two more versions of the dress.

“I was so fixated on the striping across the chest and shoulders that I couldn’t get past the images for something new,” she said in the film.

Funneling commands into AI, however, prompted several new versions of the dress.

“They all looked like I designed them. AI wasn’t influenced by the emotional connection I had to the photo and the design,” she continued, touting another benefit of using the technology.

Another vignette displayed mannequins wearing silver-studded bathing suit styles from the eighties. In this design exercise, which Kamali said was unintentional, the result is more of an editorial art installation rather than designs realized to be worn (though not much tweaking would be needed should that be the course).

“Hallucinations is a term used in AI that occurs when AI creates images that contain inaccuracies and distortion. These images, which contain obvious glitches, made up the artwork she entitled ‘Fashion Hallucinations’, which consisted of six eight-foot-high cut-outs of models dressed in newly manipulated studded black outfits.

“I prefer the imperfect because that is where inspiration is most pure,” she said.

Kamali was inspired to demonstrate the new technology so that other creatives could participate, putting aside skepticism and fears of it taking over the design process. She also believes that AI will help the fashion industry protect intellectual property.

Mainly as any designer or artist would consider as they are soon to enter their Eighties, Kamali’s MO was ultimately for protecting her legacy while at the same time reenergizing her brand.

“The purpose of the AIXNK brand is for the sustainable longevity of my company, using the archive to design indefinitely in the authentic NK style.”