Suspended lookbook: Speculative archive reactivation through generative AI

Employing a multi-disciplinary approach that focuses on archive reactivation, speculative design and digital lookbook-making, this practice-based research project investigates how AI-driven digital tools – specifically generative AI within Adobe Photoshop – challenge established fashion design processes. This project, through the creation of Suspended Lookbook, seeks to address how digital practices can help to reframe our relationship to existing garments and, by extension, to redefine fashion design. Positioned as a form of visual autoethnography, this experimental exploration unfolds across three intersecting strands of my personal fashion design trajectory: my initial formal training in menswear, the ensuing decade of industry practice and my current academic work on sustainability, gender and analogue–digital modes of making. Presented in the form of a visual essay, this research hopes to reveal hybrid approaches to fashion design while opening broader questions about sustainability, digitality and material memory.