Sketch. AI Prompt. Runway.

"When I was a kid, my favorite place in the world was hunched over a sewing machine. I'd cut up old jeans, hand-stitch fabric scraps into new outfits, and dream of someday seeing my clothes walk a runway. My notebooks were full of fashion drawings. Somewhere in my teens, that dream slipped quietly into the background. Life pulled me in a different direction."

"But this year, thanks to AI, I finally staged my first runway show at New York Fashion Week. Okay, not at the literal Fashion Week runways in Manhattan but on social media where people are scrolling for Fashion Week content. And the wild part? I pulled it together in one Friday night using my own AI-powered fashion brand, yanabanana. The tech stack behind the catwalk"

"Sketch to photo: I started with a rough sketch of each look. Using Google's Nano Banana image generation model, I transformed my doodles into photos. Sometimes I generated two photos (a "start" and "end" scene) that would ultimately create a more interesting runway moment. Models on the runway: Through prompt engineering, I iterated until all my looks walked the same runway that I had decorated with my photos of the water view from Yasuragi."

A childhood dream of staging a runway show was realized by producing a digital Fashion Week presentation on social media. The Stockholm Archipelago Collection drew inspiration from Yasuragi, featuring architectural shapes, blue kimonos, and pines by the water. Rough sketches were converted to photoreal images using Google's Nano Banana model, with paired 'start' and 'end' scenes for dynamic moments. Prompt engineering placed models on a consistent runway set with photos of the water view. Midjourney's video model generated short clips, Suno produced a Scandinavian-inspired soundtrack, and iMovie edited and assembled the final show.

Read at Fast Company