Benetton combines the ethnicity of cities to create the “face” of fashion capitals

To launch its Carnival Collection, Benetton has unveiled a new campaign called The Face of the City that celebrates ethnic diversity in the fashion capitals of the world. Each of the models wearing items in the range is an amalgamation of each city’s specific racial mix – combining the portraits of individual women using an algorithm that ensures the proportion of each ethnicity is reflected through features such as skin tone, the shape of the eyes and nose, hair type and colour, as well as the shape of the face.

The portraits were created using statistical demographic analysis incorporating international data as well as city-specific census reports. For example, the research found that in Milan, Filipinos and Egyptians are the most populous foreign communities and in Paris only 5% of foreign residents come from Africa.

“The resulting face for each city was then composited it into the final image, giving life to the capital’s ideal resident,” says Benetton. “All together, the six faces are stunning portraits coming from a world in which the melting pot, so revered in thirty years of Benetton’s images, has finally become the norm. Surely a software may have helped to reveal it, but there’s little space for doubt: that world is finally here and diversity is even more beautiful than we imagined it to be.”