Lisa Vogl sees her clothes as solutions. For Muslim women like herself in the United States, affordable, fashionable, and conservative apparel is hard to come by, says Ms. Vogl. So she launched a clothing line, now featured in Macy's stores, to meet that need. Long-sleeved ruffled shirts, wide-leg jumpsuits and an assortment of hijabs – all creations of Lisa Vogl – are now featured at Macy's as part of the company's first ever launch of a women's modest clothing line. To shoppers, they're just clothes, but to Ms. Vogl they're solutions.
Vogl lives in Orlando and is a practicing Muslim who chooses to dress conservatively. She often had to visit different stores in hopes of finding the right styles to layer to suit the modest tastes she preferred. Rather than wait around for someone to fulfill her clothing needs, Vogl, along with Verona Collection co-founder Alaa Ammuss, launched the clothing line in 2015 at an Orlando boutique. "There are millions of Muslim women here in the US, and there's a lack of clothing that would work to meet our religious requirements as well as be fashionable and affordable at the same time," she said, adding that the clothes were for anyone seeking modest attire. While the feedback at Macy's has been largely positive,not everyone gave the product line a warm reception. Some took to social media to vent their frustrations.
Would you wear a dress with a large hole in it? How about a pair of trousers with two extra legs? Researchers at Facebook have used artificially intelligent algorithms to design a 1,000-piece collection of grunge-inspired tees, dresses, jumpers, and more – and let's just say it's not very good. The resulting designs, published on arxiv, might not be ideal as far as practicality and style are concerned (see above), but the team hopes the computer-made clothing will provide a flash of inspiration for living, breathing, human designers. The process involves something called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN),
which pits two neural networks trained on a large database of fashion images against one another. The first network comes up with the idea. The second network then approves the design or shoots it down. Over time, the pair hone their skills, theoretically at least, becoming better and better designers. The researchers added in a third network (called StyleGAN) to limit the designs to wearable shapes.