AI Digital Fashion Runway
Time Doesn’t Walk the Runway - It Folds Through It
“An Experimental runway experience that fused motion capture, AI, and immersive fashion”.
I was Project Lead of a multidisciplinary team exploring motion, memory, and materiality through AI and immersive design.
Using OpenPose and DensePose, I extracted skeletal motion data from archived London College of Fashion runway footage and retargeted it onto digital avatars in Blender. These avatars were dressed in 3D womenswear garments co-designed in CLO3D, with AI-driven style transfer supporting print and textile simulation.
The final digital runway was built in Unity and Unreal Engine, integrating the avatars into rich, cinematic environments. Featured in Forbes as a pioneering example of AI in fashion, this project lays the groundwork for future exploration at the intersection of fashion, motion design, and emotionally intelligent storytelling.
Featured in Forbes:
Why fashion needs more imagination when it comes to using AI
Motion Capture
Using OpenPose and DensePose, I extracted skeletal keypoints from archival runway footage to capture the nuanced rhythm of real-world motion. The pose data was exported as .bvh files and retargeted onto digital avatars—preserving the essence of the walk while preparing it for garment simulation and environmental integration.
Motion becomes more than movement - it becomes data as choreography, style as signal, and memory as code.
The Process: Motion Capture
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1. Archived Runway Video
Pose and rhythm extracted from real-world footage
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2. OpenPose Skeleton Overlay
Joint detection + motion path converted into .bvh animation
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3. Avatar Rig in Blender
Motion retargeted and refined for avatar integration.
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4. Digital Runway Walk in Unity/Clo3D
Avatar walks the scene, wearing Timefolded garments
Theme: “ The Timefold Collection”
Born during the global stillness of COVID, this collaborative digital runway explored what it means to protect the body and hold time.
Six designers, each with a distinct voice, came together to shape a cohesive collection—soft, layered, and deeply resonant.
Using chiffon, padded silhouettes, ruffles, and sculptural forms, the garments evoke a sense of protection without rigidity - as if the clothing itself is a shield of memory, a cocoon of emotion, or a fold in time made visible.
Folds, puffs, and bends became our shared vocabulary - symbolic of how time distorts, loops, and carries us when the world pauses. The digital space became our runway, our mirror, and our sanctuary.
The result is a futurist reflection on connection, comfort, and the bending of time - a visual language built from distance, but woven with intimacy.
Garment Design:
Moodboard: Garment Design
Theme: AI, Futuristic, Cosmic, Protection, Time, memory
Clo3D: Garment Simulation and Digital Draping
CLO3D was used to prototype and simulate all garments, allowing real-time draping, fabric behaviour, and motion preview. Each digital garment was created around the animated avatar, blending technical precision with sculptural form. Folds, padding, and silhouette were aligned with the Timefold concept—clothing as both shield and signal, shaped by motion.
Garment: Fabric Design - The Timefold collection
Moodboard: Signals from a folded future
Theme: AI, Futuristic, Playful, Cosmic, and Geometric
In The Timefold Collection, fabric becomes more than a surface - it becomes a signal of memory, distortion, and protection. These AI-generated textile designs echo the warped rhythms of time: spirals, grids, and cosmic motifs reflect how memory folds, loops, and glitches.
Using style transfer and neural textures, the prints feel like lost transmissions - as if garments are catching echoes from another timeline.
They are playful yet haunted. Futuristic, yet familiar. Cosmic, yet coded.
Here, the digital meets the emotional: geometry turns soft, and pattern becomes language.
These are not just prints. They are temporal signals woven into form - playful shields for bodies moving through uncertainty, built from the frequency of future memory.
AI Style Transfer: Signal Print
A temporal transmission-coded in pattern, distorted in time
To create the surface design of each garment, I used AI style transfer to merge GAN-generated art and curated references into textile-ready prints. These prints were applied to garments in Clo3D, combining futuristic geometry with cosmic nostalgia. The AI acted as a creative collaborator, generating textures that felt both surreal and wearable - prints with personality, pattern with memory.
CLO3D - Create Style Transfer
CLO3D - Apply Style Transfer
Virtual Worlds. Emotional Depth. Atmospheric Power.
Moodboard: Digital Mythscapes: The Runway as a world Rewritten
Theme: Cinematic, Digital, Mythic, Atmospheric
These environments serve as the stage for the digital runway - built not from bricks, but from signal, simulation, and imagination. Inspired by the aesthetics of Unreal Engine and Unity, this world is part dreamscape, part data-stream.
Neon-soaked streets, submerged silence, high-rise futures and synthetic terrains - each scene reflects a different layer of our digital subconscious.
They are not just backdrops - they are psychic terrains for the garments to move through, breathe in, and come alive.
Time folds in the alleyways. Light behaves like memory. Reality glitches, then rebuilds.
This is a world where fashion and architecture speak in tandem - a world constructed for beauty, emotion, and signal to coexist in electric stillness.
Atmospheric Fields of Signal
Final scenes were assembled in Unity and Unreal Engine to build immersive digital environments. The avatar, dressed in AI-designed garments, was placed in atmospheric worlds shaped by light, texture, and sound. These environments served as narrative extensions of the clothing - portals that reflect memory, emotion, and future terrain.
The Runway as a Portal
A Digital Threshold of signal, Emotion, and Myth
This is not a backdrop - it’s a dimensional field. Created using game engines like Unity and Unreal, these environments hold more than just light and motion - they hold memory, mystery, and myth.
In the pink-misted forest, a lone figure walks not a catwalk, but a threshold -between past and possible, silence and signal.
Every particle of mist, every towering silhouette, every flicker of motion is part of a language - a whisper of the future, coded through atmosphere.
This is the new runway:
Emotionally immersive.
Narratively charged.
Digitally sacred.
A dream world where the model is not just seen, but felt.
Closing Statement
This project was more than a digital runway - it was a reimagining of what fashion, memory, and motion can become when freed from physical constraint.
By merging archival movement with AI-generated design, emotionally intelligent garments with immersive space, the work creates a bridge between dimensions. It doesn’t just ask what we wear - it asks how we move through digital worlds, and what stories our silhouettes still have left to tell.
The future of fashion is not just about technology. It’s about presence.
And this was only the beginning.
Collaborations: Curious minds and creative collaborators are always welcome. Whether you’re into AI, animation, or storytelling through design—let’s connect and see what we can create together.
Contributors: Costas Kazantzis for his Unity/Unreal Engine 3D environments and Greta Gandossi, Mary Thrift, Ashwini and for their CLO3D Designs.