4.  M&Co Dress   [24th June 2026]

It started with an email from M&Co which featured this dress:

M&Co White & Red Embroidered Cotton Tie Waist Dress View full-size

(Available to buy here, by the way)

I wanted to change the design, so decided to have a play with AI image generation to see what it produced.

I chose perchance.org as they have no limit to how many images you can generate.

As writing prompts for AI is an art in itself, I asked ChatGPT to create one for me:

fashion illustration, watercolor illustration, front view, full body shot, woman wearing a square neckline summer dress with broad shoulder straps, soft flowing fabric, elegant gathered waist, natural pose, light airy summer feeling, editorial fashion illustration, soft pastel colors, flowing skirt, practical elegant design

See what I mean about an art?

I'll spare you the hilarious fails (one-legged models, models with three hands etc etc), but this one caught my eye:

Watercolour fashion illustration of a young woman in a flowing pastel blue-and-pink sleeveless dress, standing against a white background with wind-swept hair. View full-size

I liked the colouring of the skirt, so tried to recreate it with actual watercolour paints:

A watercolour painting of the previous dress. View full-size (protected)

I'm sorry the quality isn't better, it's a whispy watercolour on white paper, scanned in. Basically, the idea was to paint the right half of the skirt blue, the left half of the skirt pink, and then blend the two halves with the opposing colour.

So, some caveats, since this was my first watercolour ever. For my first attempt I blagged some pages from my son's sketchbook, but the paper was too thin (135gsm) - so I nearly made holes in the paper. My wonderful sister then gave me a spare watercolour pad she had (300gsm), and that worked just fine.

Now, with a clear picture of what I wanted, I set about trying to recreate the dress digitally.

It took a while, but I eventually figured out a workflow that worked:

A flow diagram of my workflow: Create character, animate, clothe then stage View full-size (protected)

(This, incidentally, was created using draw.io)

The first iteration had the clothing stage second, but in order to animate clothing, an animation is required, so the second and third steps had to be reversed.

... and just yesterday, I managed to nail the rendering. Enjoy:

(no sound)

View higher-res (protected)

Central to the animation is a stock animation called 'graceful dance' within iClone. I did colour her hair (this was my attempt at blonde - be kind!) and I also selected a makeup set for her face. It's not helped that the lower quality rendering necessary to prevent the render time being measured in months, gave the avatar a doll-like quality. I haven't mastered expressions yet, those will come. In any case, the avatar starting and finishing in a static pose* lended itself towards a wind-up doll or something coming to life, dancing, then returning to stillness.

*Since I was using physics to animate both the hair and the dress, the engine requires a period of settling at the start, hence the static pose.

© Kevin Warren - fibrocreativity (fc)