Dear Shaded Viewers,
Demna, always a sign of the times with digital clones, an AI soundtrack, face-scanning, Gucci-Balenciaga “hacking” ..it had me fooled and I loved it.
https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/akg3bb/balenciaga-ss22-show-review
Titled “Clones”, Demna’s show didn’t actually happen, despite the funereal audience in all-black and the minimal catwalk. Instead, it was a CGI production. Eliza Douglas, the artist who has opened or closed every one of Demna’s shows for the house, was the only model, her face photogrammetry-captured and CG-scanned onto deep-fake models wearing the collection (which was indeed real). Luckily, Demna began consulting with tech geniuses before the pandemic, thinking about alternative ways of showing fashion. Last season, it was a dedicated video game. This time, he enlisted video producer Quentin Deronzier to deploy a range of digital post-production processes that take just as much time and craftsmanship as Balenciaga’s hand-stitched leather goods: planar tracking, rotoscoping, machine learning, 3D modeling, photogrammetry, CG grafting. Soundtracked by an AI bot ‘singing’ La Vie En Rose, the result was so hyper-real that it was almost disturbing.