FUTURE FASHION questions how we dress as we age and is part of a larger body of work called ‘Our Relationship With Clothes’, a project that seeks to cultivate a more positive and empowered connection between people and their clothing. Australia is the second largest consumer of textiles in the world, and I believe that talking about our individual and collective relationship with clothes can positively impact our day-to-day lives and bring awareness to consumption, textile waste and social injustice within Australia and beyond.

“There are four main categories of diversity in fashion I consider across my work: age, gender, ethnicity and size. In this case, each image represents a woman or women who are visually older. Something that became apparent early on when using AI was that most of the resulting images were Caucasian, even though ethnicity or race wasn’t an instructive term. There is also no body diversity, with the majority of women generated being smaller or similar to the average size of an Australian woman. To balance this, I gave specific instructions and have had varying degrees of success. I understand that AI draws reference from existing photographs created and within its resources, so this lack of diversity may also comment on the broader lack of diversity within this space. While I hope this grows and changes, I’m optimistic that by inputting, pushing, selecting and favouriting images of older women, I’m helping to affect the future outcome for age diversity in this space and inspire other creatives to do the same. 

6,500+ images were created to produce the 115 works currently available as part of this project. Not all AI is created equal.” Liz Sunshine