A routine audit of a Cape Town fashion exhibition found that its AI-assisted catalogue had assigned 14 garments to designers who never existed, including a 1978 coat described as “100% cloud”. The errors affected 41 of the show’s 312 labels, but the museum says every item has now been checked and visitors are being invited to spot the corrections.
The audit, completed on 5 October, found that a text-cleaning tool had mistaken blank fields and shorthand notes for prompts to fill in missing information. The catalogue gave 14 pieces fictional maker names, misidentified 19 materials and added eight descriptions that had no basis in the archive.
The catalogue’s strange corrections
The exhibition, “Stitching the Wind”, opened in August at the fictional Cape Strand Museum, in a converted waterfront warehouse. Its 312 garments and accessories trace South African design from the 1950s to the present. The museum paid R1.8 million (about €91,000) for the catalogue project, funded by the Southern Design Council, a regional design-promotion body.
Auditor Nikola Novotná said the tool had been asked to tidy spelling and standardise catalogue entries, not research their contents. “It turned a blank space into a whole Parisian atelier,” she said, describing the invented attribution on a locally made jacket. “Then it called a wool coat cloud. We had to check every line against the physical object.”
It turned a blank space into a whole Parisian atelier.
Nikola Novotná, auditor
The museum says the coat is wool, as its original handwritten record stated. Its note had been shortened to “wool, cloud-grey” before the software processed it. The system treated “cloud” as a fibre type, while its invented French-sounding design house came from an empty maker field.
A label becomes part of the show
Curator Hung Doo H'ng said staff first noticed the odd entries when visitors asked where they could buy “cloud fabric”. Rather than close the exhibition, the museum removed the inaccurate labels and added a small display explaining how the catalogue went wrong. “People are laughing, but they are also asking who gets to describe a garment,” he said.
Textile conservator Mridula Balasubramanian, who checked a sample of the records, said the mistakes were easy to catch only because staff could compare them with the garments and archive cards. She praised the museum for keeping the original notes alongside corrected labels, so visitors can see what changed and why.
The audit also found that the tool had converted several abbreviated colour notes into elaborate descriptions, including “sunset over the Karoo” where an archivist had written simply “rust”. The museum has restored the shorter wording and asked the software supplier to disable automatic additions to historical records.
The exhibition will remain open until January, with a free guided tour on Saturdays devoted to the audit’s oddest catalogue entries. H'ng said the museum would use the episode to revise its digital records policy before the next collection goes online. “The coat is still wool,” he said. “But now it has the best story in the room.”
