It was Karl Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel for thirty-six years, who quipped that he designed in a manner of a computer, his methods like an Intel processor extraordinaire, as if he was ‘plugged into’ Chanel mode.

Lagerfeld’s codifying of Chanel informed Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren’s designs for their Viktor & Rolf couture show. The pair mused that artificial intelligence could reinterpret the house’s archive, namely their use of bows and frills, trims, and notions. Their resultant design decisions offered glimpses of shrunken, crumpled, boldly decorated and pared-back designs, as well as proportions ranging from the wildly exaggerated to the form-fitted.

The show comprised twenty-four different looks that were derivations of three classic items of clothing: the beige trench, the cream blouse and blue trousers, all made from 900 metres of silk gazar, a textile invented by the (now-defunct) Abraham textile company and couturier Cristobal Balenciaga. As a finer open-weave fabric, gazar gives amplitude to silhouettes, especially when cut on the bias.

The arc of the show commenced with a trench coat, featuring an exaggerated raglan sleeve and belted waist, and progressed through to trenches where the body was crushed with gathered folds and a high collar. This developed into a more crumpled version of the trench, seen with chemise-pantalon combinations, either shrunk or adorned with bows of varying scale. In one trench, Viktor & Rolf engineered a large bow from tying the sleeves of the trench at the waist, with the rest of the garment falling like a large circle skirt. Elsewhere, the trench was cropped like a toreador’s jacket and allowed to fray. It was worn with fuller pantalons that had the same undulating, rippled and gathered folds shown earlier.

Frills, furbelows, and flounces appeared after this section. There was also a jacket trimmed with rows of frills and an outfit with a fitted navy trouser and a collared blouse with a small marionette doll attached to the front, buttons running down the centre-back and a bow at the nape. Another trench coat with an incredibly deep revere was worn above a large crumpled overstuffed breast, like a sage-grouse bird. The closing look then featured an opera cape take on the trench and a blouse with macro leg-o-mutton sleeves.

By embedding a design process that offered a range of outcomes ad infinitum, it became difficult to trace the origins of the three garments, but this was where the real excitement was found. Moreover, where the response to artificial technologies was most salient. The only recognisable features in the collection were the colours—beige, cream, and navy—and the consistency provided by use of the same fabric. Viktor & Rolf pushed similar conceptual limits for Fall/Winter 2003 with a show of thirty-two looks, where the models appeared as red-headed clones of Tilda Swinton. It was an enacting of Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra concept. The models were replicants or copies that depicted things that either had no original or that no longer had an original form.

Now, twenty-two years later, where artificial intelligence uses ontologies to interpret information, analyse data and problem-solve, it is stirring that Viktor & Rolf have used this as a methodology for their human-based design praxis, especially when the creative industries are under their greatest threat.