The French house Balenciaga unveiled, Sunday, the video of its spring 2022 collection presented by the same model, Eliza Douglas, digitally cloned by the film director Quentin Deronzier.

By Ludmilla Intravaia

A virtual fashion show no longer raises a fashionista eyebrow, as digital tools have dominated fashion weeks since the start of the Covid-19 crisis. At least until last Sunday. On June 6, Demna Gvasalia, the creative director of Balenciaga, set the fashion tech bar a notch higher, by unveiling his Spring 22 ready-to-wear collection, of which only clothes and accessories were made, In Real Life, in a workshop.

The rest, the models, the spectators and the catwalk are computer generated. They were never there. So far, nothing new, except that on closer inspection, something is wrong: the 44 people who walk the catwalk all have the same faces. That of the artist Eliza Douglas who appears regularly on Balenciaga runways.

A collection presented by clones, whose video uses many technological tools, of which the creative director of the French house is fond of. Starting with deepfake, a multimedia faking technique based on artificial intelligence that allows audio and video files to be superimposed on others, in order, for example, to model a person’s face on that of another or to reproduce the voice of someone artificially. To better understand this technology, watch this BBC video from 2017, showing the use of deepfake on footage of US President Barack Obama.

Some silhouettes of the fashion show are made by deepfake algorithms. For others, Eliza Douglas’s features, digitally scanned by photogrammetry, a measurement technique used to create photorealistic 3D models, for instance for video games, were grafted onto those of other fashion models.

The post-production of this film by the French director Quentin Deronzier also includes, as indicated by Balenciaga press release, “planar tracking, rotoscoping, machine learning and 3D modeling, implemented in order to achieve a hyper-realistic effect”. All this to showcase Demna Gvasalia's creative intention, as explained in theses terms : “Balenciaga’s Spring 22 presentation considers our shifting senses of reality through the lens of technology. We see our world through a filter—perfected, polished, conformed, photoshopped. We no longer decipher between unedited and altered, genuine and counterfeit, tangible and conceptual, fact and fiction, fake and deepfake. Technology creates alternate realities and identities, a world of digital clones.”

The sci-fi-inspired soundtrack of the show is signed by the musician BFRND. The French artist, regularly working on Demna Gvasalia's shows, used text-to-speech (or speech synthesis), a computer technique for generating sound signals, to create an artificial voice from texts. In this case, the lyrics of the song La Vie En Rose by Edith Piaf, recited in a monotonous tone by a synthetic voice.

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Another reference to the world of tech in this deep fake fashion show, and to computer hacking this time, the Hacker Project unveils a series of accessories and leather goods that mixes the codes of the French house with those of Gucci, by reinterpreting the signatures of the Italian brand as Balenciaga products. In doing so, the Hacker Project "explores and questions the ideas of authenticity, counterfeiting, and appropriation within the fashion industry", notes the press release of the brand.

For example, the Gucci double-G logo is replaced by a Balenciaga double B on monogrammed bags. Or another accessory displays, hand-tagged, "This Is Not a Gucci Bag" in homage to Réné Magritte's painting, La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images), in 1929.