ANNAKIKI FW24-25
“The next fifty years will be the era of AI.” These are the words of digital culture scholar Kevin Kelly, who in his book “The Next 5000 Days” predicts that AI will be equated with automation and the industrial revolution, leading a new revolution: just as humanity has changed the planet through wisdom, artificial intelligence will continue to bring new changes to the world.
As Kelly said, while we are not yet able to clearly define what “artificial intelligence” is, we have already been swept away by the tide of time, beginning to learn how to coexist with it.
The ANNAKIKI Fall-Winter 2024 collection by Anna Yang is themed “the era of artificial intelligence” and presents 50 looks in a retro-futuristic style through a digital runway format, exploring the theme of coexistence and co-creation between artificial intelligence and humanity. This season, she used the fusion of real photography and AI technology as a creative concept, creating a virtual runway from set design to audience, and specially presenting eight virtual looks generated with the assistance of AI. The innovative capacity and broad imagination demonstrated by AI have left the designer amazed. What originally required a week or more of work can now be accomplished in an extremely short time thanks to AI technology, and the reality of the finished products is difficult to distinguish. This seems to herald a significant reduction in the technical complexity of design, allowing anyone in the future to design their own clothing line thanks to the power of technology.
However, Anna soon realized that AI is not omnipotent. For designers full of creativity and dedicated to bringing ideas to life, fashion is the ideal manifestation. Although AI can generate “fashion” through data, it often lacks coherence and feasibility in design and cannot be fully transformed into real products, especially during the sampling process. This has led Anna to recognize that AI still has limitations at this stage and cannot fully replace human creativity and aesthetic sense, nor establish emotional connections that touch the heart. Humans can not only create art but can also turn concepts into physical reality, uniquely appreciate art, and experience the transmission of information; this is a unique and irreplaceable characteristic of humanity.
Imagining living in an era where artificial intelligence and humanity coexist and thrive, Anna has created a series of futuristic warriors wearing armor, symbols of power that subvert traditions and question the conventional, bravely fighting against the excessive invasion of artificial intelligence while protecting the precious creativity and imagination of humans. This season, Anna has committed to challenging the new limits of silhouette design, using only black and white as the main colors to explore the infinite possibilities of the absolute. In addition to common materials like leather, coated denim, and composite materials, she actively introduced new technological fabrics. The first nine looks of the runway were inspired by the concept of “shell,” emphasizing that while artificial intelligence can create, it lacks emotions and soul, producing only soulless “shells.” Based on this concept, Anna used a variety of composite fabrics like fishbones and combined materials of leather and aluminum, combined with three-dimensional stitching technology, to create designs with wide silhouettes and unique visual effects.
Armor is the focal point of this season, thanks to three-dimensional design technology and details of removable armaments, allowing the wearer to easily transform between everyday life and more dramatic scenes, demonstrating great adaptability and versatility. The iconic three-dimensional wave sleeves appear throughout the collection, celebrating feminine strength. The brand’s symbol, the four-pointed star, is ubiquitous, artistically carved on the chest, revealing the hidden beauty of the body or concealed in the details, maintaining the naturalness of movement and emphasizing the brand’s unique identity.