A(I)rchive

The Gianfranco Ferré Research Centre promotes cultural and educational initiatives based on the activation of the historical archive, engaging students and researchers in the experimentation of advanced techniques of visualisation, representation, and access to artefacts, with the aim of developing new models for accessing and enhancing Ferré’s legacy. Within this context sits Artificial A(I)rchive, a project of the Final Synthesis Lab of the Master’s Degree in Design for the Fashion System at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano, which explores how generative artificial intelligence tools can amplify a designer’s creative process.

Working in teams, students combine machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence models to synthesise visual content and explore new narratives of Ferré’s design language. Through a dual mode of interaction – based on text-to-video prompting and image-to-video visual prompting – they explore and use the archival data made available by the Research Centre in both natural language and visual form, placing computational creativity and human creativity in direct dialogue.

The project starts from a single archival object, the Striped Jacket from the Ready-to-wear Fall/Winter 1985 collection, from which students develop a capsule collection composed of three outfits. Archival photographs, original drawings, paper patterns, and Gianfranco Ferré’s design language derived from the transcription of his lectures become inputs for generative AI tools such as MidJourney, ChatGPT, and The New Black, enabling the definition of a new process of co-creation between designer and artificial intelligence. The objective is to investigate how human and artificial creativity can interact, expanding design autonomy and opening up new opportunities and challenges for emerging designers.