AI overview
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to offer assistance and tools that might help streamline creative processes, enhance workflows and streamline administration efficiency for a costume designer.
By analysing past production and real-time data, AI tools can help predict budgeting requirements, organise large costume inventories, suggest material options, and track wardrobe across multiple scenes and characters, or simply provide a summary of each costume from the script. AI’s ability to automate these logistical aspects allows costume designers to focus on creative decision-making while maintaining efficiency in resource allocation and planning.
In the areas of creative support, tools on offer include aspects of design generation, visualisation and simulation, continuity, fabric selection and historical accuracy checks, and many more. AI can help designers experiment with different looks and styles rapidly, allowing them to test ideas and refine costumes in a virtual environment before creating physical prototypes.
So what is AI?
Put simply, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a goal. It’s an ambition to program machines and software to behave in a way that seems human-like or ‘intelligent’.
Rather than simply obeying instructions, AI systems aim to reason, learn, communicate and make decisions, mimicking the kind of traits we associate with humans.
Before you read further, have a look at the ScreenSkills AI 101 page (also linked in the resources section below).
How are costume designers starting to use AI in 2025?
Script and reference analysis
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- Can be used to copy notes from one script draft to the latest version, highlight changes and summarise documents.
- Generates visual interpretations of the script (e.g. mood boards, thumbnails, colour journeys) and supports creative insight.
Creative asset discovery and generation
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- Assembles and organises visual references, assists with visual/image-based searches (e.g. “tunics with blue waistband”), and generates photorealistic versions of sketches or concepts.
Design development and visualisation
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- Suggests materials, colours, textures based on thematic cues; creates variations on a base design (e.g. for crowd looks); simulates how costumes or looks respond to lighting and environment.
Decision support and planning
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- Assists with preparation for negotiations, gathers and structures large sets of research or production notes, and recommends options when facing design or logistical challenges.
Visual enhancement and upscaling
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- Converts quick concept visuals or sketches into cinematic-quality assets or video snippets for use in previews or concept review. For example, you might show the AI a new character concept sketch, a reference image and an image of the artist, and ask the system to ‘show this artist with a costume based upon this concept art and reference’.
Audience impact testing
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- Analyses how specific visual elements might influence audience perception, especially in genre-sensitive work.
Continuity and asset tracking
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- Uses image-based tracking to maintain continuity across scenes and manages reference photos across shoot days.
Wardrobe management
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- Assists with visual tracking and automated inventory management of costumes and materials.
On-set visual validation
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- Simulates how designs will appear under current lighting conditions and environmental factors, supporting decision-making in fast-paced settings.
Creative summarisation and organisation
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- Summarises meeting transcripts and notes, tracks to-do lists, and ensures important conversations are not lost during editorial and post.
How is AI limited in helping a costume designer?
Fitting rooms are emotionally charged places; many times, a costume designer might be one of the first points of contact for an artist when they arrive. The trust, empathy and collaborative human intuition a costume designer has with the artist in these situations matters. This is just one of the many moments where costume designers truly make a difference, and it is unlikely that AI will replace this part of the role anytime soon, if ever.
"I find that I need to take in the script and understand it, feel it, otherwise I don’t understand the contexts and hidden meaning in the narrative”
AI assistants can be a brilliant tool to summarise and help highlight key script points or changes of note. However, digging into the script, understanding it, and the implications for the costume are still crucial. Rather than seeking to replace some of the laborious jobs with AI, it’s worth thinking about how they could be made more enjoyable, faster or easier to engage with, perhaps turning text into emotive visuals, for example.
Creating a costume design often involves many aspects of collaboration with others, so much effort is put into creating the right kind of environment where people can give their best contribution, truly bringing together ideas, bouncing thoughts around the team and feeding off the live performance happening right in front of you.
These things are difficult for an AI to manage; crucially, the systems often don’t have access to the important real-time data, and secondly, the previous training data can be very poor. Being able to respond when things don’t quite go to plan or when personalities are creating challenges means that many things are going to be managed by a human for quite some time.
AI can have a place supporting and enabling this to be even better, and perhaps creating new art forms alongside traditional film and TV. But, ultimately, as long as we continue to value collaboration, AI is unlikely to replace this creative drive or the authentic story and performance.
Preparing for the future as a costume designer
To prepare for the future, costume designers can consider developing a working knowledge of AI-driven tools for communication, visualisation, design and concept development, continuity, quality, resource management and data analysis.
Learning how to use AI to catalogue, label and archive your own data, including working drawings, final finished documents, along with images and video of the completed look (both before and after), and in-camera shots. As well as the costings, plans, schedules and timings of production, will enable you to train AI in the future to automate tasks and projects, or assist in providing useful estimates to other departments. Perhaps in the future you may be able to have your own department AI assistant that can answer common external requests, for already shot materials, like photos and lookbooks.
By becoming proficient in AI-enhanced design software and self-hosted AI models, designers can leverage these tools to maximise creative output, custom AI content generation and data security.
In the future it will be possible to use AI and machine vision to track all costumes that are around a film set, or crucially, where they have been put back in some of the giant costume collections available in warehouses in the UK. This has the potential to enable you to give a photo to an AI, and it could simply tell you which building, floor, aisle and rack a costume like this is on, massively speeding up the process of finding options for consideration.
Technology might also start to be integrated directly into day-to-day processes. For example, it would already be possible with today’s technology to use AR overlays to show you yesterday’s ‘finished result’ directly through digital glasses, highlighting continuity disparity in real-time after dressing.
Engaging in training through ScreenSkills and other online resources will be valuable for costume designers aiming to stay at the forefront of the industry. Costume designers who embrace these new technologies will be better equipped for projects. Delivering a blend of technical understanding and precision with great creative flair.
Embracing AI in costume design
AI presents exciting possibilities for costume designers, combining creative support with data-driven insights to enhance both design and management. While AI can streamline logistical tasks and assist in visualising initial designs, the core of costume design; capturing a character’s essence, aligning with the story’s visual language, empowering the artists on-set and enriching the viewer’s experience, remains a deeply human skill. For those working in film and high-end TV, thoughtful use of AI tools and assistants can be an invaluable tool that supports innovation without replacing the artistic vision.
Links to other ScreenSkills resources
Discover the costume designer job profiles in:
Read the costume designer skills checklist
Explore more AI-related training, events and opportunities with ScreenSkills
Read AI 101, an overview of some aspects of AI in the UK film and TV industry