Costumes Populaires Reimagined uses AI to bring to life historic traditional dress from across the Middle East and North Africa
JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA – 2 APRIL 2026
Community Jameel today published Costumes Populaires Reimagined, a digital, colourised, animated rediscovery of a celebrated 19th-century photographic collection of traditional dress from the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.
Commissioned for the 1873 Vienna World's Fair, photographer Pascal Sébah used the photomechanical ink-based collotype process to create vivid portraits of people in traditional costume, including from the Arabian peninsula, the Levant and the Balkans.
Sébah’s images were published, with text by Osman Hamdi Bey and Marie de Launay, in a single volume titled Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873.
Marking the book’s 150th anniversary, Community Jameel collaborated with longtime partner the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation in 2024 to use a high-resolution recording process to digitise a copy of the book in a private collection in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, Community Jameel engineers then developed a novel framework for colourising the digital copies of Sébah's monochrome collotypes using historically accurate palettes derived from period sources, and animated the images into dynamic, lifelike figures.
The result is a vivid and immediate encounter with the richly-detailed costumes in Sébah’s work.
Nathaniel Daudrich, Head of Product at Community Jameel, said: "Reimagining Sébah’s images with AI breathes new life into this catalogue of 19th-century fashion and costume from the Middle East and North Africa.
“We hope this project will spark new creative conversations and inspire a new generation of fashion designers to see Sébah’s work, not as something fixed in the past, but as living source material for reinterpretation and contemporary expression."
AI-powered process of rediscovery
The colourisation process used optical character recognition to extract information from the book’s text, which was then analysed using a large language model to identify costume details.
The results were cross-referenced with 19th-century coloured drawings to construct an accurate colour palette for each costume.
Generative AI models were then tested and refined to apply these palettes with contextual precision and to animate the colourised figures.
The reimagined collection is now available to explore online alongside the original, digitised book.
Intersection of digital technology and traditional craft
The Costumes Populaires Reimagined project reflects Community Jameel’s commitment to exploring the intersection of digital technologies with traditional arts, craftsmanship and design.
In 2017, the Factum Foundation delivered a training programme on photogrammetry techniques at the Jameel House of Traditional Arts in Jeddah, the pioneering centre for reviving the teaching of traditional craft and design co-founded by Community Jameel and The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in 2015.
Participants documented at-risk architectural sites in Al-Balad, the historic district of Jeddah, and then used both the digital record and the traditional arts, such as gypsum-carving, to explore new approaches to architectural conservation.
In 2018, the Factum Foundation and Art Jameel collaborated with the Royal Commission for AlUla to deliver training on photogrammetry in AlUla, Saudi Arabia.
Participants recorded more than 74,000 images at three different sites, including a six-metre panel featuring petroglyphs of ibex and a rock carved with a petroglyph of an ostrich, alongside the Lihyanite Library at Jabal Ikhmah, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
