ChatGPT — YOUR NEW FASHION STYLIST, AND BEST FRIEND! MY OWN AI STYLING EXPERIMENTS
Expect directional renderings with Image Generation, not necessarily rooted in real-life items. A great ‘discovery’ tool.
AI Styling — It’s all about the Prompts!
SPOILER ALERT: SEE MY AI STYLING EXPERIMENTS BELOW, AND READ THE ‘PUNCHLINE’ AT THE END.
I had stumbled upon an interesting article in Vogue Business that delved into the fashion-forward habits of Gen Z, specifically, those enabled by ChatGPT.
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It seems that this tech-savvy generation is leveraging the power of AI to inform their style decisions, and inspire their fashion choices.
The secret to unlocking this AI-driven fashion wisdom? Crafting carefully worded questions.
And, in many cases, uploading relevant images, such as Pinterest and Google search inspiration, photos of existing clothes, and any number of artifacts, to provide fodder for the engine.
“Develop a seasonal fashion mood board for me.”
“Help me come up with new outfits from my existing wardrobe.”
“Create a high/low wardrobe for me.”
Vogue Business reports an uptick in videos related to using ChatGPT for help with fashion styling ‘conundrums’. In digging in to some of the TikTok content, users seem fairly happy with the results produced by the platform.
I ran a set of queries myself and was marginally impressed, but the tool (GPT-4o) was not without limitations.
More on this below, but the following was what the engine gave me when I asked for something “Chanel-inspired”.
This is way off base; nothing about this is Chanel-inspired (other than the handbag).
ChatGPT Fashion Styling
Prompts ran the gamut, and included:
“Here are photos of some key work pieces from my closet. Suggest some fresh outfit combinations from that selection.”
“Help me find my own style.”
“Help style me, based on my body type.”
“Help me create a style mood board.”
“What do you think of my outfit?”
And many more; there were even videos about the prompts themselves.
AI Image Generation for Styling
I decided to keep my own queries pretty simple. I’m a fan of Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana, so I asked the engine to come up with options that were a bit lower-priced.
Outfit #1 / Prompt #1 — “I love Brunello Cucinelli, give me outfit inspiration for something less expensive.”
Bravo, ChatGPT, bravo! Beautiful, and classy!
The ChatGPT engine must consider Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli to be monochrome lines. For whatever reason, the engine seemed to lean too uniform in tones, a lot.
A few takeaways..
Nothing in the image was hot-linked, so, while I did search Google, I had a hard time finding the items, if I found them at all.
The Jessie blazer was out of stock; the pricing was incorrect.
The Vince blouse — no match in Google; likely a rendering, more on that below.
The trousers — that style pant on Everlane was roomy and slouchy, not straight leg, as in the depiction. No such exact shoe; no such exact watch.
AI was rendering my requests, but it was more ‘directional’ inspiration; not pieces I could find/buy.
Many of the links were broken or had incorrect prices, or reflected items that were sold out; in some cases, I was provided with erroneous style names. The engine seemed to get confused, often.
And often times the images generated were simply not what I asked for; see the notes pertaining to Chanel.
I got the following error message frequently when clicking thru the links provided:
AI provided the sources, and while they weren’t what was rendered (which weren’t real pieces), some of the referential pieces were quite beautiful, like this.
Note: the aforementioned issues pertained especially to image generation. When I asked for information that didn’t involve image creation, some of those links worked (while some didn’t), and had a ‘Buy’ button, like this — beautiful.
Outfit #2 / Prompt #2 — “I like the Loro Piana look, give me inspiration for something lower-priced.”
Looks totally Loro Piana, but, monochromatic and boring.
Outfit #3 / Prompt #3 — Similar inspiration, but with the request for less monochrome.
Beautiful; it turns out, none of these items are real.
And After All That!
“The image you received was generated, meaning the clothing shown in that photo was not pulled directly from real-world brands like Max Mara — it was a visual rendering inspired by your style preferences (elevated, non-monochromatic, quiet luxury). The Max Mara–style coat you noticed in the image is a lookalike, not a direct item that exists exactly as pictured.”
The outfit in the image is inspired by brands like Max Mara, Toteme, and Joseph, but the clothing shown was AI-generated and not assembled from real product photos.