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

Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy 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

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ethics.ai (17 July 2026), “‘Adversarial clothing’: are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream?,” evidence record 11382, https://ethics.ai/record/11382 (originally published by The Guardian).

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