Kering’s Creative Directors Are Now All White Men—Sparking Criticism From Some Industry Insiders
This idea emerged when I recalled the viral news from last October about Sarah Burton stepping down as the creative director of Alexander McQueen. She was succeeded by Irish designer Seán McGirr. This succession decision sparked backlash, as all the creative directors of these labels are now white men. Kering, the luxury fashion group, owns McQueen along with other prominent labels such as Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga.
I plan to explore this topic from a female perspective, highlighting some of my favorite young women fashion designers. I will speculate on how they might reinterpret collections from Kering’s historical brands if given the opportunity to showcase their visions.
I plan to use an AI model to combine the current garments created by Kering's all-white male creative directors with the styles of independent women fashion designers I admire.
DISCLAIMER: In the work below I have used ChatGPT to debug my code but since I ended up not using those AI models and only showed you some failed results I don’t know how relevant it is. For the final model I have used someone else’s code and refined it by removing some unnecessary code, especially relating to UI features as well as a connection to Google Collab. Some of the text in this Read.me is also rephrased with ChatGPT to give better clarity.
Additionally I have also used YT videos for data scraping but again, in the end, I ended up using a Chrome extension. Both are linked below.
How to Scrape and Download ALL images from a webpage with Python
Screen Recording 2024-06-17 at 13.25.20.mov
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import os
url = '<https://www.mytheresa.com/gb/en/women/designers/bottega-veneta?categories=0006&page=2>'
r = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')
images = soup.find_all('img')
for image in images:
name = image['alt']
link = image['src']
with open(name + '.jpg', 'wb') as f:
im = requests.get(link)
f.write(im.content)