How Midjourney’s Omni‑Reference Transforms Fashion Visualisation

The latest Omni‑Reference feature in Midjourney can revolutionise how fashion and textile designers prototype and visualise their ideas. Traditionally, creating a seamless print demanded four to twelve hours in traditional software, followed by another round of labour: applying that print to flat sketches, ordering strike‑offs, and waiting weeks for garment samples before you could judge whether the artwork truly worked in context. Every iteration absorbed precious time, fabric, and budget.

Omni‑Reference flips that process on its head. In simple terms, it lets you tell Midjourney, “Put this exact element in my image,” whether the “this” is a motif, logo, object, or character. Feed the AI your freshly generated Patterned AI print and, within minutes, you’ll see photorealistic mock‑ups on fully styled models – no painstaking repeats, no speculative sampling. That speed cascades through the entire product cycle: faster approvals, more frequent collection drops, and a lower environmental footprint thanks to fewer physical prototypes.

Ready to see it in action? Here’s how to create a new pattern and visualise it on a model in just three quick steps.

Creating eye‑catching prints with Patterned AI is fast, intuitive, and free to get started. Our platform can spin out dozens of high‑quality, seamless patterns in seconds, giving you a wider creative playground than traditional software ever could.

You have three straightforward ways to generate a design:

• From a text prompt. Describe the elements you want (motifs, colours, illustration style, mood) and let the AI do the heavy lifting. A well‑crafted prompt like “Tiny white flowers with subtle green stems scatter against soft sage, leaving airy negative space.” produces a gallery of ready‑to‑use repeats. (Need inspiration? We have a full prompt‑writing guide on the blog.)
• Start from an image. Upload your image and choose Image Variation to see fresh layouts and styles, or Image Mixing to blend two visuals into something entirely new. Perfect for refreshing archive prints without losing brand DNA or getting a fresh spin on an old pattern.
• Use your assets. Drop in logos, icons, or clip‑art via the Elements tool. For best results, we recommend using PNG files with a transparent background. Choose a layout, duplicate or flip motifs, tweak opacity, and rearrange layers until the pattern feels just right – all inside the browser, no extra software required.

With these options, you can experiment freely, iterate quickly, and land on a production‑ready print.

Once your repeat is saved to your computer, it’s time to see it on a product. Open Midjourney (make sure Model Version V7 is active in Settings), drag‑and‑drop your pattern into the prompt field, and place it in the Omni‑Reference bin. A reference‑strength slider lets you decide how closely the AI follows your reference with values running from 0 to 1000 (default is 100). Use something around 400 if you want an exact match; drop below 100 for a looser, more creative spin.

For our tests we set Reference 400 · Stylise 50 · Variety 10, then typed a simple prompt such as:
“all‑over‑print T‑shirt on a white background, repeat print from omni‑reference.”

Generating the blank garment first proved more reliable than going straight to a model: it preserves the original artwork, lets you pick the best silhouette, and only then do you upscale or place it on a figure. The same workflow applies to cushions, wallpaper, packaging – anything that needs a quick, photorealistic mock‑up before sampling.

Save the blank garment image you just generated, then drag it into the Omni‑Reference bin with a fresh prompt that describes the lookbook shot you want. Think of Midjourney here as a rapid‑prototype studio: the render won’t replace a professional product shoot, but it gives you a convincing preview of your print on‑body, helping you identify the most promising patterns and avoid costly sample runs.

Example prompt
“young model, light hair in a ponytail, front‑facing lookbook photo, soft studio lighting, wearing blue jeans and a T‑shirt with an all‑over print, T‑shirt from omni‑reference.”

Within seconds you’ll have photorealistic visuals that show exactly how your pattern looks like on a person. At this point you can decide: tweak the motif, try a different colourway, swap the garment, or move forward with chosen print.

Pro tip: the free version of Patterned AI provides web‑resolution files that are perfect for concepting, social media, and presentations. When you’re ready to send a design to print, upgrade to the high‑resolution download to avoid any loss of detail on the finished product.

By pairing Patterned AI’s instant pattern generation with Midjourney’s Omni‑Reference mock‑ups, you can collapse weeks of design, sampling and photography into a single afternoon, freeing your budget, reducing waste and letting creative ideas reach the market at the speed of inspiration. While nothing replaces final strike‑offs or a professional shoot, this AI‑powered workflow gives designers and brands a low‑risk sandbox to experiment, iterate and polish concepts before a single metre of fabric is printed.