‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?

Models wearing garments created by Cap_able, which which markets them as making AI recognition more difficult. Photograph: PR

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.