What is Google's Nano Banana & What Does It Mean for Fashion Content Creation?

What is Google’s Nano Banana?

Google’s Nano Banana is a generative image model that was released on August 26th, 2025 to the general public. If you aren’t familiar with what a generative image model is, put simply, it's an AI that allows you to prompt any image.

Why Should I Care?

What makes Nano Banana stand out in particular is its promptable Image Editing abilities. In the most popular Image Editing benchmark, it shows a 15% jump - the largest ever recorded in the history of the benchmark. 

With its release, a pandora’s box of new generative image workflows have been enabled.

To demonstrate just how big of a leap forward Nano Banana is, today, we will be focusing on a complex image editing task - Model Swap - for our demonstration of Nano Banana’s capabilities. 

In this demonstration, you will learn what Model Swap is, how it's done, how the (previously) top generative image models performed with this task, and you will see for yourself how Nano Banana leap frogs them in a direct comparison of the top models. We’ll also take a look at its limitations.

What is Model Swap?

Model Swap, at its core, is a simple task. Take the person from any image, and cleanly replace it with another person, while perfectly preserving the original clothing, accessories, and pose.

Its main application is in e-commerce and fashion, allowing brands to display products on a diverse range of models without the time and expense of traditional photoshoots.

Think of it as a digital twin that can instantly become anyone, anywhere, wearing your exact product.

Model Swap Showdown

Before today, creating a clean model swap workflow was incredibly complex, expensive, and time-consuming. There were two primary ways to do it, and both were a headache. For fashion content creation, our key focus in this evaluation is on whether or not we are able to preserve garment details accurately, while transferring over the correct texture, lay, color, and fit.

Generative Image Editing Models (GPT-Image-1, Flux Kontext, etc.)

Using general-purpose image models requires prompt engineering for every generation, and trial and error. Incorrect skin color might bleed through the swaps, especially in cases where the model swap is from two very different skin tones. This approach is inconsistent, not scalable, and a massive time sink… or at least it was, before Nano Banana.

Time to see how different generative models perform with model swap…

We will be using the following image:

This will be our prompt for the Model Swap

Replace the person in this image with a Puerto Rican with dark features and medium length curly hair. She has an athletic body type. Preserve the rest of the person's clothing and accessories perfectly.

In this comparison, I considered testing the following models against Nano Banana:

I decided to make the top 3 models from the Image Edit benchmark compete - Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, GPT-Image-1 (aka the model used in ChatGPT), and Flux Kontext Pro (“best” open-source image editing model).

Original VS Flux Kontext Max

Notice the changes that Flux made that we didn't ask for: aspect ratio, camera framing, jewelry she's wearing, quality of the image...

Original VS gpt-image-1

gpt-image-1 is an incremental improvement - it preserves the jewelry better and adjusts the camera framing less, while also producing a higher quality output.

Original VS Nano Banana

Here we can really see for ourselves Nano Banana's magic. During the Model Swap, the model's face, accessories, body shape, and clothing are perfectly preserved. It's able to only touch the region of the image which needs changes, while also maintaining consistency in the changes that it does make.

The other top contenders fall visibly short with aspect ratio changes, worse image quality and poor prompt adherence.

Thinking Bigger Picture

The rapid improvement of core AI models means that companies focused only on solving a single technical problem are living on borrowed time. The future belongs to the platforms that flexibly integrate the best new models into their workflows.

By building a platform with the expectation that models will get better, you can stay ahead. This is exactly what we’re doing. Yesterday, a perfect Model Swap was a technical feat. Today, thanks to Nano Banana, it's a simple prompt. All while being faster and cheaper than ever. This is the new standard.

The FASHN AI platform already leverages the best models for Virtual Try-On, Model Creation, Model Swap, and more. Experience the new standard yourself. Try them out.