Has Fashion Had Enough of AI?

The Business of Fashion Podcast

This episode of The Business of Fashion Podcast explores the growing tension between digital simulation and physical authenticity in fashion,

Key takeaways

• Fashion has shifted from valuing physical qualities like fabric texture and craftsmanship to prioritizing logo visibility and image appeal.
• AI-generated imagery exacerbates the disconnect between digital representation and physical reality, deepening consumer alienation.

Main topics

• The simulation era in fashion
• AI's role in shaping digital imagery

Notable quotes

"Imagery of clothing is more important and almost more real in some senses than the physical garments themselves."

"When we relate to products mainly through the image rather than the item itself, you know, we become sort of alienated from it."

Conclusion

Fashion stands at a crossroads between digital simulation and authentic human experience. While AI and screen-based consumption have

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:08) Hello and welcome to The Debrief from the Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler-Young. For many of us, our first encounter with fashion happens on a screen. We discover clothes through social media, watch runway shows on our phones, and decide what to buy from pictures online. But how has that changed the clothes themselves and what we value about them? That's a question my colleague Mark Bain explored recently with fashion critic Eugene Rapkin, who believes that the industry has sacrificed creativity and quality in favor of image and hype. It's a compelling argument at a time when higher prices have left shoppers questioning whether luxury is even worth it anymore. Now, as AI is making digital imagery even easier to produce, a quiet rebellion is taking place. Some luxury brands are commissioning painters and illustrators, hosting phone-free dinners, and offering hands-on experiences that give customers a reason to step away from their screens. So can this renewed emphasis on human creativity, craft, and connection offer a meaningful response to fashion's image-first culture? Joining me to explore this are Diana Pearl, BOF's U.S. editor, and Mark Bain, BOF's U.K. editor and technology correspondent. Mark, Diana, welcome to The Debrief. Speaker 3 (1:26) Thank you, Sheena. Speaker 4 (1:27) Always happy to be here. Speaker 1 (1:29) So, Mark, I want to start with what your story talks about, which is this era of simulation or the simulation era. I'm going to ask you for the too-long-didn't-read, non-pair-reviewed version of what that actually means. What is meant by the simulation era? Speaker 4 (1:45) imagery of clothing is more important and almost more real in some senses than the physical garments themselves, especially, you know, in the way consumers interact with them. Speaker 1 (1:56) One of the things that Eugene is basically premising in his book, but also in your conversation is that has changed how clothes are produced today, how they're designed, how they're merchandised. Can you talk a little bit about what that has meant for fashion today as he sees it? Speaker 4 (2:09) Yeah, I would say there are a variety of implications here, but one of the main things, and something you can probably easily spot as just a regular consumer of fashion, is it's put greater and greater importance on the logo. And this is not a brand new thing. This has been happening for quite a long time. Speaker 4 (2:31) you know, as we interact more with clothing through imagery rather than the physical garments themselves, the logo becomes more important, especially when we're talking, once we start getting into the era of like social media and e-commerce, where you're looking at little screens, where small details like, you know, fabrics texture become harder to spot, let alone things that, you know, might have denoted quality in the past, like the actual hand feel and that kind of stuff. Like now the logo is just. the easiest thing to identify and that has become really kind of the most important thing on a garment. And if the logo becomes the most important thing, there's really less incentive to focus on all that other stuff too. So it creates the situation where, you know, creativity and actual design and that sort of thing has taken a backseat and producing image-friendly garments that are very logo heavy have become, you Speaker 1 (3:26) know, Speaker 4 (3:26) that's become the priority. Speaker 1 (3:28) So this is interesting because Rabkin talks about this idea of the alienation of consumers. So you order something online because it looks beautiful online or because you spot the logo, as you said, and you say, this is great. This is fill in the blank product. It arrives and it doesn't live up to what you saw online. Eventually, this results in the consumer feeling, quote unquote, alienated. Can you talk a little bit about how that has shaken out in the last couple of years? Speaker 4 (3:52) Yeah, so Eugene talks about this idea of the alienation of the consumer, which is barred from this French theorist. And it's really this idea that when we relate to products mainly through the image rather than the item itself, you know, we become sort of alienated from it when we can't connect to those tangible things anymore. And, you know, e-commerce really plays into this. And, you know, there's a meme online about like the Shein version of something. It's like you see one thing, you order it, and what you get is sometimes hilariously different. But it doesn't just apply to Shein. I think Eugene's argument is that it's come to apply to a whole lot of fashion, including luxury fashion. And there's been this cycle where we interact with things or we see images online. We're buying products based on images online. And then when we get the physical thing or we come in contact with the physical thing, it doesn't match our expectations. There's been this decline in quality over the years that a lot of people besides Eugene have talked about. And so arguably, that's one of