Creators Are Using This Not-So-Secret Tool to Make Fabulous Fashion Content

With new AI innovations, announced at Adobe MAX 2024, Adobe Express is a fashion lover’s playroom.

When influencer Liv Schrieber wants outfit inspiration, she turns not to ShopStyle or even Pinterest, but to Adobe Express. Tasked with picking an outfit for a wedding, Schrieber felt excited instead of stressed, because she could plug prompts like “Create a mood board of what to wear to a wedding” into the all-in-one design, photo, and video program and yield gown suggestions. Meanwhile, for 21-year-old fashion content creator Kai McPhee, consulting Express’ TikTok Creative Assistant for tips on how to create high performing content means he can worry more about the ensemble he’s putting together and less about whether his post will reach audiences. For other style connoisseurs, they can use the software to get rid of pesky objects in the background of their photos so that their accessories take center stage.

Express is not just for the sartorially inclined, though. Ian Wang, vice president and head of product for Adobe Express, believes that everyone is creative. He points to one of the company’s mission statements, Creativity for All, as a guiding principle of his work. The phrase laid the foundation for Express, Adobe’s newest program, launched in October 2023.

Wang says the Express team is “just getting started.” A myriad of new Express features were introduced at Adobe MAX 2024, the world’s largest creativity conference, last month in Miami. Wang’s personal favorites include Animate All: an AI-powered feature that can instantly add motion a static piece of content; One-Click Apply: a tool that allows users to reproduce designs, logos, fonts, colors, etc., across pages; and Text to Image: a generative AI tool that allows users to create content like coloring book pages when given simple prompts.

“[It’s] about taking something that you'll create, or you've already created, and with one click, or with very little time, you can use it for all sorts of things,” he says. For creative professionals, it allows them to work more efficiently; for non-professionals, it enables them to create content they might not otherwise be able to.

“For creators, one of their big problems is to stand out and have their voice be heard and seen. There's a lot of eyeballs that you're competing for, so having content that isn't vanilla and plain and actually represents your personality is so important,” Wang says. “What we're trying to do is to bring in these amazing imaging and video capabilities, but also to apply it with a certain style and taste because everyone's got a different aesthetic.”

Users also have different needs, depending on their ages and nature of their work. Wang notes the breadth of Express: It can entertain kids by generating images from simple descriptions, such as, “cute little monster with tongue out, ultra realistic.” Or create coloring pages for high schoolers to fill in with digital oil paint brushes.

Of course, the use of A.I. prompts conversations punctuated (sometimes rightfully so) with fear or mistrust. This is not lost on Wang. He emphasizes that Adobe cultivates A.I. technologies in a responsible and uplifting way, taking the how and why of their practices to heart.

“We always think of technology as an enabler to solve real user problems,” he explains. “Generative AI has been a big topic over recent years, but Adobe has been using A.I. for a very, very long time. How we use technology is really important. It has to be done in an ethical and commercially safe way.” For example, another Adobe product, Photoshop, has used A.I. technologies going back 20 years. From then to now, they’ve only trained their models on content they own or have licenses for.

Adobe isn’t just working to empower creatives in the present, it's looking to nurture creative minds of the future. At MAX, Adobe spotlighted a new global initiative that expands the Adobe Digital Academy’s focus to provide 30 million young learners with training and certifications in A.I. literacy, content creation, and digital marketing skills by 2030. The company committed more than $100 million this year and collaborated with several educational organizations, like Coursera.

“When it comes to the next generation and schooling, we think about creativity as a discipline,” Wang says. “It's not just a skill that you learn when you want to be a designer. Creativity is just as foundational as structured thinking, logical thinking, STEM. It’s a foundational capability.”