Has Fashion Had Enough of AI?

Sheena Butler-Young (0:08)

Hello, and welcome to The Debris 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 Marc Bain explored recently with fashion critic Eugene Rabkin, 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 US editor and Marc Bain, BoF's UK editor and technology correspondent. Marc, Diana, welcome to the debrief.

Diana Pearl (1:26)

Thank you, Sheena.

Marc Bain (1:28)

Always happy to be here.

Sheena Butler-Young (1:29)

So Marc, 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-paraviewed version of what that actually means. What is meant by the simulation era?

Marc Bain (1:42)

Basically, it's just this idea that imagery of clothing is more important and almost more real in some senses than the physical garments themselves, especially in the way consumers interact with them.

Sheena Butler-Young (1:56)

One of the things that Eugene is basically promising in his book but also in your conversation is that has changed how clothes are produced today, how they're designed, how they're merchandise. Can you talk a little bit about what that has meant for fashion today as he sees it?

Marc Bain (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. But 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 social media and e-commerce, where you're looking at little screens, where small details like fabrics, texture become harder to spot, let alone things that might have denoted quality in the past, like 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 back seat and producing image-friendly garments that are very logo-heavy have become, you know, that's become the priority.

Sheena Butler-Young (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?

Marc Bain (3:53)

Yeah. So Eugene talks about this idea of the alienation of the consumer, which is borrowed 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, we become sort of alienated from it. When we can't connect to those tangible things anymore, and 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, you know, 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, you know, we interact with things or we see images online, we're buying products based on images online.