How do these strange-looking clothes fool facial recognition?

With the rise of facial recognition technology has come an increase in demand for ways to avoid it. That’s why one Italian fashion house designed a clothing line that will deter facial recognition systems from trying to identify the wearer.

The clothes may look a bit strange, but there is a method to this apparent madness. Called the Manifesto collection, the clothes’ patterns contain specific cues that will lead an AI to think that it is looking at an animal, rather than a person, so it doesn’t even bother trying to scan your face. It therefore works without the need to cover your face, a currently popular method for fooling facial recognition systems.

Capable, the fashion house responsible for the clothes, tested them against the neural net-based object detection system YOLO (You Only Look Once), which identifies faces and objects in real-time footage. Between the price tag ($460 just for a jumper) and the strange looks you’ll likely get from passersby, it’s not likely that these clothes will become a mainstream AI spoofing tool anytime soon.