Artificial Allure: Inside Fashion's AI Obsession
Design by Hyouji Joo
The faces of fashion are changing — and they’re not all human anymore.
In the August print issue of Vogue, American fashion company Guess unveiled its summer collection with a campaign starring a flawless blonde model dressed in a striped maxi dress and floral playsuit. From her perfectly placed hair to her eerily poreless skin, she embodied perfection — almost too much. Nestled in the fine print, readers learned that the model wasn’t human at all. She was entirely generated by Artificial Intelligence, part of Guess’s latest digital initiative that has since stirred widespread backlash from enthusiasts and creatives alike.
Across the fashion world, AI is quietly positioning itself as the industry’s newest designer, stylist and muse. Despite the overwhelming outcry, the list of brands experimenting with the tool continues to grow. Coach, Estée Lauder, Mango, Hugo Boss and Revolve are among the many that have ventured into digital modeling. To companies, the benefits are apparent: AI models provide flexibility in creating, localizing and scaling across numerous markets.
This marketing experiment exemplifies a growing trend: the fashion industry has become increasingly captivated by the allure of artificial intelligence.
Within the retail landscape, AI is revolutionizing the way we shop. The traditional experience, often characterized by simple pleasures like drifting between racks and feeling the heft of a wool coat, is slowly being replaced by glossy simulations. AI promises to eliminate uncertainty, but in doing so, it also removes the spontaneity that makes style feel personal and unique. In this way, shopping has become less of an exploration and more of a predetermined outcome.
Despite this, retailers are racing to integrate AI more deeply. Mango’s recent launch of Mango Stylist, an AI-powered shopping assistant active across the U.S. and Europe, signals just how aggressively brands are leaning into algorithmic retail. The tool functions like a digital stylist, embedded directly into Mango’s website and Instagram, pulling curated outfits, interpreting a shopper’s taste and serving trend forecasts in real-time. But when an algorithm defines our wants before we even name them, taste shifts from something we shape to something we’re robotically given. The nuance and oddity that make personal style exciting begin to disappear, replaced by the same algorithm-approved recommendations masquerading as individuality.
That erosion of individuality isn’t limited to shopping. It’s creeping into the editorial world, too. Earlier this year, British lifestyle publication SheerLuxe introduced “ReemBot,” an AI-generated fashion and lifestyle editor presented alongside real staff members, complete with a desk, Polaroid camera and a curated Instagram feed. Unsurprisingly, what the brand framed as “innovation” quickly ignited backlash. Readers accused the publication of glamorizing a synthetic beauty ideal and sidelining real journalists, particularly after noticing that Reem appeared to be modeled after a Middle Eastern woman, despite having no cultural point of view or lived experience.
The rollout raised a larger concern rippling across the fashion media: AI can mimic the aesthetics of editorial work, but not its essence. Fashion writing has always been grounded in perspective, marked by an insider understanding of the emotion behind a designer’s collection or the cultural history of the hottest new trend. ReemBot, by contrast, offers only manufactured polish without substance. It is all surface and no story.
Fashion has never been about efficiency, but rather the messy, emotional and ultimately human expression it fosters. The more brands lean into AI-generated content, the greater the risk that the industry will lose its unique sense of voice entirely, leaving us with an endless loop of polished sameness.