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Yesterday I stepped away from client work to make something just for the fun of it, and to try a different way of creating.
I started with a public domain piece from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Ingres' Portrait of the Princesse de Broglie (1851–53). It's an icon of the Met's collection, and the thing that always gets me is the way Ingres painted fabric. The deep blue satin gown, the gold-embroidered shawl, the pearls and enamel. You can almost feel the weight of the silk.
So I took that dress and asked a question: what if Martin Margiela reinterpreted it?
Working entirely in @floraai and Flora Fashion Studio, I extracted the gown, reimagined it through a Margiela lens, put it on a model, walked her down a runway, and shot her backstage and in an editorial spread with a Vogue feel. From a 19th-century oil painting to a full fashion story in one afternoon.
What I love is how little distance there is between inspiration and creation. Art history becomes something you can actually build on.
Want to try Flora? My referral link: https://refer.flora.ai/susie-aminian-0jub
#FLORAMuseum
Love the black and white picture!
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The Lover’s Eye was never just a portrait. It was a portrait of a gaze. The art of looking back.
For the #FLORAMuseumChallenge, I chose the 19th-century Lover’s Eye Bracelet, an intimate object featuring a miniature of a loved one’s eye. Pieces like these were worn close to the body so the wearer could imagine their beloved’s gaze resting upon them 👁️
That idea became my creative starting point: what if the gaze that we see in art could be returned?
So I imagined a woman walking through present-day New York wearing the bracelet. As we get closer to the miniature, we find "Ivy" actually looking out from her own time. The person preserved inside the object is suddenly looking back at us, creating a fleeting exchange between past and present.
The engraved name “Ivy” on the back of the actual bracelet became a small but meaningful detail that helped me imagine the story behind the object.
And so I wanted to create something that felt like a visual poem 💛
A gaze captured centuries ago, finding its way back to another pair of eyes.
wow. Love the idea!!
"The Latest Fashions, Expressly Designed and Prepared for Le Moniteur de la Mode"
THE CORE IDEA: "TIME" AS THE VARIABLE
My reimagining doesn't change the idea of the piece, it changes the century. Same two women. Same gestures, same silhouette-language of the bustle dresses translated into 2125 couture.
This project takes Jules David's 1887 fashion plate, a candid, staged moment for Le Moniteur de la Mode, and asks what that same magazine would be staging in the year 2137. The two women keep their exact poses, their exact positions, the fan and parasol raised at the same angles, even the same masthead and caption text but everything they wear and everything around them has been carried forward two and a half centuries: a fitted liquid-lamé gown standing in for Victorian tailoring, a ruby-beaded illusion gown in place of polka-dot silk, a modern folding fan and a transparent bubble umbrella replacing their antique counterparts.
Pulling the frame back reveals the world this future fashion actually lives in a Champ de Mars where the Eiffel Tower can be seen, "the soul of Paris", its ironwork intact but laced with soft bioluminescent light, overlooking a Paris that has evolved rather than been replaced.
And finally, the piece imagines the artwork's own origin: a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a future Jules David, seated at his easel on that same terrace, the canvas still half-finished, painting these two women as they hold their pose for him showing not just the reimagined fashion plate, but the living moment it might have been made from.
Link to original "The Met Art": https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/919442
I love it Tom!! 🚀
A painting that survived on the one wall still standing, after the house around it was destroyed. The storm it once depicted became real smoke, rising from the same horizon behind it — same place, same hills, same water, but the calm is gone.
I didn't age the painting forward or backward in time. I placed it somewhere that exists in parallel to where most of us are sitting right now — a place where this kind of stillness has been replaced by something else entirely.
Original piece: "Approaching Thunder Storm" by Martin Johnson Heade, 1859, oil on canvas — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access)
Link: The Inspiration Piece from the Met Museum
Built on FLORA, starting from a static image of the painting, then building the surrounding wall and environment through iterative generation and manual refinement, before animating the final camera move outward.
My submission for the FLORA × The Met Challenge.
This deserves more than just liking, this deserves to be featured! 🏆 Nailing that surreal narrative contrast behind the painting creates such a compelling submission.