The Selective Backlash to Fashion AI
Victoria's Secret backed off from releasing an AI campaign, fearing negative response. Meanwhile, Etro just released one seamlessly.
Last year, around the time of the Barbie movie release, Victoria’s Secret asked Maison Meta, a generative AI agency based in New York, to help them create a Barbie-inspired campaign. Maison Meta created AI images of women wearing Victoria’s Secret products. The brand worried about the AI people looking too real, and asked Maison Meta to make them appear more like CGI creations.
“They loved it,” said Cyril Foiret, Maison Meta’s founder and creative director. But the brand never released the images. “They got a little bit afraid of the potential backlash,” Foiret said. (Victoria’s Secret did not respond to a request for comment.)
Brands including Valentino, Suit Supply, Coperni, and Prada have all used AI for ads without headline-making backlash. But Victoria’s Secret had been trying desperately to position itself as inclusive, and its concern was warranted. Levi’s endured a wave of negative press after announcing it would use AI models. And earlier this month, the size-inclusive brand Selkie, which is known for its whimsical, ultra-romantic dresses, was the target of internet ire after announcing on Instagram that its Valentine’s Day drop had been designed using AI image generator Midjourney.
Selkie calls itself “an imagination driven brand [that] encourages artistic self expression,” and commenters were upset that the brand appeared to be cutting artists out of its process, particularly when its dresses start at $249 for a mini and can go up to $1,500 for a bridal gown. “I am just of the mindset that a brand with this price point would be able to pay actual artists for work. And for a brand that I thought prides itself on it’s inclusivity, this seems like a slap in the face,” wrote one.
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“This is the future of art and as long as an artist is utilizing it, it is the same as what we’ve been doing with clip art,” Selkie founder Kimberley Gordon told TechCrunch (she and Selkie have not responded to inquiries from Back Row seeking comment). “I think it’s very similar, except it gives the artists a lot more power and allows us to compete in a world where big business has owned all of this structure.” Gordon added that, in response to the criticism, Selkie won’t include AI-generated images in future collections.
Yet on Tuesday, two weeks after Selkie posted the Valentine’s Day collection, Italian high-fashion brand Etro released an ad campaign created by generative AI that has been received with little if any malcontent. Women’s Wear Daily wrote up the campaign positively, noting that the models in the images were AI-generated. In a statement, Etro said the images contain “a humanity that is both familiar and alien.”
The disparate responses to Selkie and Etro highlight the struggles certain brands and designers will face when it comes to incorporating AI into their work. Followers have different expectations of brands like Etro, which aren’t strongly associated with values around things like inclusivity, than they do small, independent ones like Selkie. However, vocal anti-AI social media users may not realize that fashion AI isn’t just publicity stunts here and there that will quickly fade — it’s a revolution that’s already under way. And pressuring certain designers into abandoning it might only give unscrupulous corporate behemoths willing to exploit it even bigger advantages in the marketplace.
Jessa Maddocks, the founder of the size-inclusive brand JessaKae, which does eight figures in sales annually and has a large online following, said she has never used AI to design her line and probably won’t. “You can't create something unique solely using AI,” she said. As an inclusive brand, using AI for designs or promotional imagery would likely be a risk. Maddocks saw what happened to Selkie, which, she noted, has a customer base that includes a fair number of artists who were bound to be upset by an AI drop.
Yet, fashion AI experts argue that AI can create something unique, which would put late adapters at a disadvantage. “This is really a change of society,” said Maison Meta’s Foiret. “And it's going there no matter if people want it to or not.”
Foiret has been working in fashion for fifteen years, starting as a stylist, and founded Maison Meta around a year and a half ago after trying out AI tools. His first big client was Moncler Genius, which hired Maison Meta to help produce an AI campaign (with creative agency WeSayHi) that spotlit the brand’s collaborations with partners including Adidas Originals, Pharrell, and Alicia Keys.
After that campaign came out early last year, Foiret started hearing from other companies. Mango hired Maison Meta to train its Barcelona-based creative team in AI tools. He has done similar training for “a few LVMH brands,” and has a project in the works for Dolce & Gabbana Casa.
Midjourney is free and easy to use, but Foiret says artists can get better results from tools like ComfyUI and Automatic1111. While these allow users to do things like control the lighting in an image, they are harder to utilize, and require a PC instead of a Mac. (After being a longtime Apple user, Foiret has switched back to PCs; migrating creatives to PCs will obviously be much easier for companies with deep pockets.)
New use cases for AI in fashion continue to emerge. Maison Meta recently helped designer Norma Kamali create an AI model trained on roughly 15,000 images of her swimsuit designs in order to enable the brand to create future collections with her design DNA. They created a virtual muse of sorts named Jesse to model Kamali’s AI designs.
Like Jesse, Foiret said we can expect brands to create their own influencers. “They'll have their real influencer and they'll have their AI virtual influencer, where they'll have a little bit more control, [who is] faster, also, to work with,” he said. “It’s really crazy.”
Foiret is also talking to modeling agencies about creating digital versions of their models. The most obvious use case for AI-generated models is e-commerce images. Many fashion retailers sell thousands of items, and photograph them all on models is expensive and time-consuming. While the technology isn’t quite good enough yet for this, “it’s getting there,” Foiret said. The next wave of this will be video, so sites like Netaporter that showcase items in short clips will be able to use AI.
Ethical standards and regulations have been proposed for some of these use cases, but laws are slow coming. The Model Alliance advocacy group is working to get New York lawmakers to enact protections for models whose livelihoods stand to be threatened by unauthorized use of their AI replicas.
It’s unclear if Condé Nast’s union, which recently staged a one-day walkout over disputes with the company regarding planned layoffs, is in conversation with higher-ups about how the technology might impact jobs. Foiret said that Maison Meta has engaged in discussions with Condé Nast. “They're thinking of introducing some potential AI editorial, when it becomes the same quality as a real photo shoot. But I think they're going to be transparent about it and really announce it. And I think every brand should.” (Back Row reached out to the Condé union for comment but didn’t receive a response by publication time.)
A Condé Nast source did not deny that the company is exploring this, though said that so far, it’s only used AI to help with idea generation and making workflows more efficient. The New Yorker is also publishing AI-generated audio versions of articles, which open with the disclosure, “This is a computer-generated narration. Inconsistencies in pronunciation and tone may occur.”
While all this may sound like the dystopian spoils of a late-stage capitalist, photography-free hellscape, upsides exist. AI may very well remove the barriers to entry to the fashion industry for those who don’t possess independent wealth that all too often lubricates entrée, whether you’re an influencer, designer, or photographer. Fashion has historically been gate-kept by a small group of tastemakers and executives, but with excellent free AI tools, anyone can design a collection or create fashion images that can go viral and find an audience.
José Sobral was working as an architect when he used AI to design a fashion collection, which he entered into Maison Meta’s AI Fashion Week. Now in its second season, the number of entrants has grown from around 350 to around 600. The public votes on the first round of roughly 140 finalists, while a panel of industry experts votes on the winners. Sobral, who lives in Portugal, won the first competition, and got to spent two months in Los Angeles working with the team at Revolve, which made and sold his collection under the brand Paatiff. In a month, he’s showing another collection he designed with AI at Lisbon Fashion Week.
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Sobral, who studied fashion in college before pursuing architecture, says he pictures a collection in his head and then uses AI to generate images of it. He’s well aware of the criticism of AI, and thinks the fear that it will replace designers is overblown. “If I give [AI] to a doctor, they probably won't create fashion out of it. But if I give it to a fashion designer, and he applies his knowledge as a creative director or almost as a movie director — I think he can create fashion in some way,” he said. “Even if it's not the final product, it'll help as a mood board.”
Since winning AI Fashion Week, Sobral has stopped working as an architect. “My dream was to work in fashion, but I don’t know how I would have actually moved to L.A. and had the courage to be there and work on a collection — and for people [in the industry] to accept me,” he said. He’s also been commissioned to work on various AI fashion projects, including creating editorials for magazines and images for brands.
Riccardo, who runs the @rickdick_ Instagram feed that posts popular fashion AI meme images, is a graphic designer based in Tuscany who started using AI in November 2022. He started with Dall-e, then moved onto Midjourney, then moved onto Krea.ai. He uses Runway for videos and the Photoleap app to quickly generate ideas on his phone. Though he’s still working as a graphic designer, fashion brands including Gucci, Tory Burch, Valentino, and Coach have been commissioning him with increasing frequency to create sponsored posts with his signature ironic sensibility in hopes of reaching a younger audience. He’s also been hired to create AI images for magazines, including Amica, Style Magazine, Aeffe, Fotoshoe, and Sneaker Freaker.
Ponticelli’s most popular posts involve creating a spin on the news story everyone is talking about that day (for instance, his image of Jeremy Allen White in Calvin Klein underwear with a kitten tucked into his arm, which he posted the day the campaign came out and went so viral it resulted in a steady trickle of think pieces). That said, anything involving Anna Wintour tends to perform well.
Everyone interviewed for this story acknowledged the ethical gray area of fashion AI, ranging from copyright issues to consumer disclosures to human workers being replaced by machines. No one told me that fashion photography will go the way of floppy disks. But I can imagine fashion photography becoming highly rarified, the way fashion illustration used to be commonplace but is now special and seldom published.
Eventually, the controversy around the technology will die down, and brands like Victoria’s Secret will feel free to use it however they want. Plus, the same way social media created not just new jobs, but a whole new industry, AI will create opportunity as well. “Now you work in fashion, you need to know Illustrator, Photoshop,” Foiret said. “AI will be another request, where if you have this under your belt, then you'll definitely have a greater chance to be hired.”
The LVMHs and Mangos of the world aren’t the only ones who should be able to take advantage of that. Small brands ought to be able to as well.
Update, Feb. 2: This story has been updated to reflect the preferred name of Riccardo, the artist behind @rickdick_.
This is incredibly fascinating to me - so many facets to it. My daughter has considered a career in fashion and is also very into digital art, so all the (many!) weird feelings I have about it aside, this is a possible career path I wouldn't have considered.
There's a LOT of fear around AI replacing audio narrators... I think there's use for it in academia, but I think fundamentally, people will always want to be read to by a human voice. Possibly, human-narrated work will become prestige, and possibly fashion will be the same...