Alexander Enticknap

Alexander Enticknap may have started out at university as a STEM student, but when he made the leap into a fashion degree, he didn’t quite leave his tech roots behind.

A final-year student in the UTS Bachelor of Fashion and Textiles, Alex recently exhibited his honours collection at the end-of-year Design Honours Fashion Showcase. The inspiration? Artificial intelligence (AI).

“Over the last few years, there has been a huge debate in the fashion industry about originality, the type of creativity present in using AI, and ethical authorship,” he says.

“I was really interested in learning about how AI could be applied in a more socially sustainable manner.”

Alex’s approach involves using AI to design fashion production processes, rather than as a tool to generate inspiration using other people’s images and designs. The best example, he says, is patternmaking, which is a foundation principle of clothing design.

What happens to those shapes when they’re exposed to the artificial? What is the material of AI when it is, by its very design, immaterial? And how might those concepts be translated onto the body?  

To answer these questions, Alex curated a small dataset of patternmaking images that he fed into these AI tools. The AIs then produced a series of deconstructed shapes that formed the basis of his final-year collection.

The work was supported by a sponsorship with artisan weaving company Kullu Karishma, whose team produced a custom woven textile for inclusion in Alex’s collection.

“I’d say my work is very warped and distorted; it’s compressed and a bit abstract. It’s the aesthetic of carnival surrealism and really sculptural silhouettes,” he says.

“Pretty much everything in my collection is either stretch fabric or fabric that’s been manipulated using AI.”

The Design Honours Showcase is a significant event for honours students, who present their final-year projects to a room full of industry leaders.

But, while the Showcase may have been a milestone moment in Alex’s UTS degree, the years-long process of finding his creative voice and figuring out how to bring it to life has been just as valuable in his evolution as a designer.

This experience, which also taught him to think more expansively about design, technology and the intersection between them, was shaped in part by the university’s passionate Fashion and Textiles teaching team.  

I’ve always had this latent interest in how technology can be applied to fashion and textiles, but I think the body of work that I produce now is very true to my influences and what I’ve learnt at UTS

“It’s a practice that I’ve picked up from other tutors and designers I’ve been exposed to, where it’s about questioning the purpose of materials and fashion as a way of providing a meta-commentary on what design is and what design can be.”

Now, with the last few threads of his time at UTS being carefully tied off and packed away, Alex is preparing to take the leap away from university life and into a career as a working designer. Postgraduate study and a stint overseas both loom in the not-too-distant future, but for now, he wants to put his skills to work.

Ideally, he says, that will be with a small label doing experimental wearables — somewhere he can get hands on with other designers who share his fascination with tech-enabled fashion.