Nigerian filmmaker and artist Malik Afegbua is challenging the misconceptions around African beauty, especially within the older generation.
Artificial Intelligence has grown to become a trendy part of internet culture today. Despite being a controversial tech tool, one scroll through your internet feed will show you how many people are gearing toward an AI world.
Malik Afegbua’s fashion show which displayed photos of elegant old-fashioned seniors in the chicest African attire, took the internet by storm.
The series of images, called Fashion Show for Seniors, has garnered over 100,000 likes on social media and raised questions about computer-generated work replacing human creativity.
The fashion show displayed some of our favorite elders in their traditional wear. Many women sported goddess-like gele headdresses while the men rocked contemporary suits to the nines.
Despite each silhouette looking very modern, they still had an old African flair that many people associate with Nigerian culture.
“I’ve never seen a fashion show for elderly people, but they exist – so why not?” said Afegbua in an interview.
To everyone’s surprise, this fashion show didn’t actually take place. Instead, the models and clothing shown were manifestations of Afegbua’s imagination with additional help from artificial intelligence.
“It was virtually impossible to convince them that their experience wasn’t real, and neither were they. The world is not real. The characters are not real. It’s all aspirational,” Afegbua told ESSENCE.
Afegbua is unapologetically a champion of AI art and hopes that this style of technology will help evolve the way we view the future.
