ClothGAN: generation of fashionable Dunhuang clothes using generative adversarial networks

Clothing is one of the symbols of human civilisation. Clothing design is an art form that combines practicality and artistry. The Dunhuang clothes culture has a long history which represents ancient Chinese aesthetics. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been recently applied to multiple areas, which is also drawing increasing attention in fashion. However, little research has been done on the usage of AI for the creation of clothing, especially in traditional culture. It is challenging that the exploration of computer science and Dunhuang clothing design, which is a cross-history interaction between AI and Chinese classical culture. In this paper, we propose ClothGAN, which is an innovative framework for “designing” new patterns and styles of clothes based on generative adversarial network (GAN) and style transfer algorithm. Besides, we built the Dunhuang clothes dataset and conducted experiments to generate new patterns and styles of clothes with Dunhuang elements. We evaluated these clothing works generated from different models by computing inception score (IS), human prefer score (HPS) and generated score (IS and HPS). The results show that our framework outperformed others in these designing works.