At CES 2025, French company Imki is exhibiting shoes generated by artificial intelligence trained to imitate the style of the Jonak brand. Generative AI could simplify the release of new collections.
“Reverse the design process”this is the astonishing promise from Imki, a French company coming to exhibit products designed using its services at CES 2025.
At its booth at CES Unveiled, a pre-event during which startups exhibit products, Imki presents seemingly ordinary shoes, signed by the Jonak brand. They nevertheless have one particularity: they were made by an AI.
AI to save designers time: Imki’s bet
Created four years ago before the emergence of models capable of generating images, Imki had the idea of using artificial intelligence to simplify the lives of designers. His business is based on partnerships with major brands, such as The Kooples, Jonak or Kiabi, in order to receive large quantities of data on their previous collections. Imki then trains a specialized version of Stable Diffusion, in order to teach it to imitate the style of a brand. It is not its own artificial intelligence that is used.
Then, brand designers can use these templates to come up with new ideas.
The idea is not to automate everything: AI does not create anything on its own, it must be guided with precise instructions. Imki explains that artificial intelligence makes it possible to visualize an idea in a few seconds, and therefore save time. The designer can then refine his prompt or retrieve the image and modify it manually, before making a prototype. One of the limitations of the current model is that the AI generates an image, and not a 3D plan. So there is still a lot of manual work for designers.
According to Imki, the fashion world would not be reluctant to the use of artificial intelligence, while many artists express their opposition to this technology. “AI is just a tool” explains the French company, which sees this new way of designing clothing as a way to visualize an idea, rather than creating one without human inventiveness.
In the future, certain clothes purchased in supermarkets or elsewhere could be designed using AI. Imki explains in particular that he works on shoes and bags.
