If your goal is to accurately recreate dresses, then yes, a non-linear method would work better. But, I don't think that makes this work uninteresting. For a st

If your goal is to accurately recreate dresses, then yes, a non-linear method would work better. But, I don't think that makes this work uninteresting. For a start, PCA is very simple to implement and train, which gives it hackability that non-linear methods typically don't have. PCA makes a better tool if you just want to play around. Exploring non-realistic output is also interesting for its own sake. I find the "ghost" effect that PCA generates quite nice.