This is the script/transcript from the video above:
KOSIBAH: THE ART OF THE COUTURIER — THE MAKING OF THE BOOK
Hello everyone, and welcome to Kosibah: The Art of the Couturier — the making of the book, a short video that shows how Danny collaborated with ChatGPT and Gemini Pro to do something that he didn’t think he could do at all. Next week marks 35 years of business for Kosibah. Congratulations to Yemi Osunkoya, the Creative Director at Kosibah, on this landmark.
In full disclosure, Yemi is my husband. He also had a big birthday in April this year. I started thinking in August of 2025 about how we could mark these two occasions and landed on the idea of this commemorative book.
I don’t have a background in graphic design, although I’ve dabbled with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of tools for many years, and it’s fair to say that I have a questionable eye when it comes to visual design so I needed all the AI augmentation I could get.
The first edition of the book was created as a 2025 Christmas present – a single copy that I printed through Whitewall. I wanted printers where I could have full editorial control of the book – I sent them a pdf and they printed it. That gave me maximum control over content, layout, typography. But the printer also had to be cost-effective. For a one-off edition Whitewall fit the bill. Later, because people loved the book so much when they saw it, we decided to do an extended print run of 100 copies. We gave a copy to each of the guests at the April celebration. And we used Qin Printing in Shanghai for that.
The printers also brought some constraints. The models and I discussed their formats: landscape or portrait; landscape is good for wedding photography generally, portrait for runway. We had both. But Whitewall and Qin also had this large square format which, the models assured me, would stand out both on a coffee table and on a book shelf. They told me that I didn’t want it to look like a magazine.
Another thing that Whitewall and Qin Printing offered was printing the cover on linen. My design assistants, ChatGPT and Gemini, were a bit nervous about this in case the colours ran and details got lost on this medium. But I decided to take the risk. In the end, we got a beautiful tactile experience for the cover of the book that matches the subject matter of the cover images and the content itself.
The models and I debated the fonts. I wanted something classic, redolent of haute couture, for the titles, and we settled on Didot Pro. The copy text is Optima Nova for its humanism, clarity and warmth. These were words that the models came up with, by the way.
The next big thing was layout of the photos on the page. The models helped me design a straightforward two column, two row grid that I could use in Adobe InDesign. They taught me about the importance of white space: lots of full pages of photographs are very tiring on the eye; additionally, lots of space to breathe lends an air of luxury.
The models coached me about all the other details involved in book publishing: paper stock, bookbinding techniques, weight of the cover material.
Now it was time to start creating the content. Yemi had a bit of a clue what might have been on my mind because I asked him for his trove of photos from the last 35 years. He gave me 2,000 to sort through. Little did he know that I had Gemini pro to assist me.
I created thumbnails of the photos using Adobe Bridge and told Gemini, “You are the fashion editor of Vogue Magazine, please go through these and select the ones that have potential – they don’t have to be perfect now because we can fix them in post.” (I was learning the jargon).
We did the selection in a series of very tedious batches to accommodate Gemini’s context limits at the time. It would often invent photos in the batch that sounded great but didn’t exist. We ended up with 184 pages worth of photos.
The next step was organizing them. We could have produced a chronological retrospective, starting in 1991 onwards, but in the end, we went with a thematic approach: Sculpture, Process, Celebration and Heritage.
As we went through the retouching process, this worked very well for organizing the content – I created folders that corresponded to each of the chapters and sub-headings. We had a mixture of old, scanned photos from the 1990s through to professional photographers’ images – those didn’t need retouching at all. I used Gemini a lot for the retouching process, telling it that it was a professional re-toucher on Vogue with a focus on the fashion: not so much the model but make the gowns pop.
Sculpture is at the heart of Yemi’s design process so that fit well, and we had lots of images from professional shoots that show how Yemi moulds his dresses to his clients’ bodies. The first section was mostly professional shoots although the section from California was actually shot on my iPhone. Gemini’s Nano Banana did a superb job giving these a “golden hour” glow. Photoshop, using the Nano Banana plug-in, did the upscaling on all the images to make them printable. I was doing this over Thanksgiving and Adobe and Gemini were both giving away tokens for free (remember those days?)
My editorial assistants, ChatGPT and Gemini absolutely gushed over the Process section of the book. They felt that this was the strongest content in terms of telling what makes a Kosibah gown so special. It shows what it takes to make a unique couture gown: from initial sketch through to detailed hand-sewing of all the embellishments through to the first photoshoot with a model wearing the dress.
They were a bit more cautious about the Celebration section. They worried that it could make the book into a photo album rather than a couture monograph. I disagreed. The point here is that it don’t mean a thing, if you can’t wear that thing. Yemi’s garments are meant to be worn at real events. I know that the audience for the book is both past and future clients of Kosibah. Plus, we have stunning photos from actual weddings and some shoots that are staged to look like weddings. And there is also archival material here including images of Yemi’s very first bridal customer.
We all approved of the Heritage section which makes the connection between Yemi’s origins in Nigeria, use of African fabric and aesthetic, and the melding of European couture design into that mix. We have a mixture of runway and editorial images here.
There’s not a lot of text and I delegated much of the writing to my copywriters, ChatGPT and Gemini. I gave them the main writing points and then said, “You’re the curator of a fashion exhibition at the V&A or the Met Museum, write it like that.”
When we got to the big print run in March 2026, we were able to add a final flourish: the slip case cover which Qin Printing supplied. Again, in linen, like the cover, to give a tactile experience but very simple; just black and white. We settled on Gotham Bold for the font – since it’s debossed and foil-printed, we didn’t want any twiddly bits. It’s also a nod to this phase in Yemi’s career based in Harlem, New York.
There were some limitations. The models in 2025 struggled with as much content as I was creating. They would also sometimes invent completely new people and gowns in the retouching process (!). Adobe’s content creator would behave very strangely on just a portion of the image; if you asked it to fix an ear, it would create a giant ear in all the area you’d selected. I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to proofread the uploads I was giving to Whitewall and Qin Printing but felt like they nodded off a bit in the middle (models still do that). ChatGPT, in particular, would sometimes go into a perfectionist death spiral as it agonised over little details (like the placement of the bar under Kosibah on the slip cover). In the end, I just had to say, “We’re doing it like this.”
This was a labour of love, for sure. It took many hours of collation, retouching, searching for material etc. But, for somebody who doesn’t really know much about book production, doesn’t have much of an eye for design, but does have access to a couple of really quite capable models and the ability to pay for some extra tokens — I think this came out pretty well. Thank you.
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