Will GenAI Replace Fashion Designers?

PARIS — Will GenAI replace fashion designers?

The debate has heated up since French contemporary brand The Kooples partnered with French start-up Imki last year on a 100 percent AI-generated capsule collection, cementing machine learning’s growing influence on design.

As high street and e-commerce players embrace the powerful technology, luxury brands remain cautious about allowing software to create clothing and imagery, even though artificial intelligence now permeates every facet of their activities, from deciding which products to place in which stores to prompting chat messages with clients and helping lawyers draft contracts.

Many worry that ceding creative control to image generation systems such as Midjourney and DALL-E could suck the soul out of an industry that peddles rare objects born from the imagination of an elite circle of creative directors working in tandem with specialized artisans.

“Luxury in general is convinced that AI, however intelligent or generative it may be, cannot replace human creativity,” said Gonzague de Pirey, chief omnichannel and data officer at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. “However, it’s a tool that can help us think and create.”

Speaking at the Institut Français de la Mode’s recent Fashion Reboot seminar, the executive admitted that GenAI has already crept into the design process to a large extent. The key question is not whether designers use GenAI, but how they use it, he added.

“The technology should not be used naively,” he cautioned. “We’re talking about an educated use of GenAI.”

Above all, luxury consumers prize experience and emotional connection, so technology should always take a back seat to creativity, he argued. “We want to be a quiet tech company,” said de Pirey, noting there can be backlash from consumers when luxury brands broadcast the use of AI-powered design.

“Whether or not a fashion designer uses GenAI is beside the point,” he argued. “Do they have a point of view, and have they managed to convey that in their fashion show? That’s what matters.”

Some test use cases for GenAI include systems that generate collection mood boards or iterate designs in 3D, skipping the need for physical prototypes. GenAI is also used for advertising campaigns, potentially helping to cut back on travel-related CO2 emissions.

But senior executives from LVMH, Kering, Chanel and Compagnie Financière Richemont agreed that machines should never replace people.

“We’re extremely cautious on these topics which are intrinsically linked to humans and creativity. I think it might take us longer than other industries to go there,” Gregory Boutté, chief client and digital officer at Kering, told WWD.

Existential threat?

Nicolas Gauthier, fashion chief information and tech innovation officer at Chanel, said luxury brands must proceed with care in order to safeguard their intellectual property and know-how, but above all to preserve their aura.

“The stakes are reputational, you might even say existential. Today, when you use GenAI to create a text or image, or even products and services, you’re going against effort, accumulated experience, talent and emotional connection that take years to develop,” he told a panel on “The Role of AI in Luxury” at the Tech for Retail conference in Paris.

“What value do you ascribe to this product versus the other? There’s a real risk of trivializing what we do, and then you’re no longer talking about luxury,” he added.

Therefore, he sees limited potential for using AI to design collections.

“By nature, in design, it would be difficult to replace human sensibility, the intuitive process or the vision of the designer with generic models,” he said. “On the other hand, we could imagine supporting some of these tasks in order to augment our people rather than replace them, to ensure they’re more focused on what’s essential.”

Chanel is testing the waters in the hope of integrating the technology into a human-centered design process. “We’re in a rapidly evolving market so we can’t stay on the sidelines, but we’re protecting our fundamentals,” said Gauthier.  

At Kering, employees including designers were encouraged to explore the offerings of startups at the inaugural Inno Days event held last month at the Kering Imagination Lab, the company’s hub for digital innovation in Paris.

Among those demonstrating their services were Blng, a sketch-to-design GenAI and virtual studio for jewelry, and fashion design software Style3D, which aims to replace physical samples with its fabric simulation technology.

But Boutté does not expect GenAI to fundamentally alter the creative process.

“We’re deeply convinced it’s broadly positive for luxury in the sense that it will be widely adopted in fashion and retail, and luxury will stand out by remaining very focused on the human touch,” he emphasized. “More than ever, we believe in an artistic direction led by a person and their team who will deliver a creative proposition, as was the case before.”

The executive, who was also recently appointed chief digital officer of Gucci, noted that Kering does not use GenAI in advertising campaigns and marketing assets at present.

“We know that the creativity around our products and our campaigns is what differentiates us from other retailers and fashion brands, so we want to protect that at all costs,” he explained. “It’s going to explode, and everyone will be doing it, so I think consumers will be very attentive to that and will quickly want a return to authenticity.”

Keeping It Real

Some luxury brands, like Loewe, have purposely leaned into craftsmanship, with campaigns such as the stop-motion animation film for its collaboration with Japanese ceramics studio Suna Fujita, which won the inaugural Grand Prix in the Luxury and Lifestyle category at the Cannes Lions advertising festival last year.

“I genuinely believe that, certainly, AI is going to be really transformative to the industry in terms of improving the efficiency of how we work. But for me, the AI should really be more behind the scenes, so that we have more time to be more human with one another,” said Charlie Smith, chief marketing and communications officer at the LVMH-owned brand.

Speaking at the HEC Paris Luxury Summit, he said AI might be useful during the conception phase of a project. “But then we’ll actually go and create those things for real when we launch the concept, because I think seeing something for real is way more impactful than seeing a digital version of it,” he said.

He cited the example of Loewe’s third and final collaboration with Japanese animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli, centered on the fantasy film “Howl’s Moving Castle.”

“We actually built a giant inflatable castle that we took to the Eiffel Tower and also Marble Arch in London, and we had loads of people coming to visit it and posting it and sharing it to social media themselves, whereas if we had just created a digital version of the castle, people wouldn’t have gone and seen it and shared it,” he said.

LVMH is collaborating with Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence on research projects, concentrating on areas such as AI safety and human-centered design, meaning its initiatives are regularly audited for compliance.

In order to ringfence its data, the world’s biggest luxury group has created its own chatbot, MaIA, based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 foundation model. Each of its luxury houses uses its own version to guarantee confidentiality, and the chatbots can be trained for highly specific applications, such as interactive store guides for new sales associates, de Pirey said.

“We haven’t done it yet, but we can very well imagine doing the same for our house archives,” he said. “We could train a model on the archives of Vuitton, Moynat, Celine or Loewe, and gradually, the model would be capable of generating outputs that correspond to this specific training.”

The danger of this “lazy” approach is that GenAI would spit out standardized designs, de Pirey said. “So yes, the risk is absolutely huge,” he warned. “This tool is neither good nor bad in itself. There can be a bad use of the tool that kills creativity, and there can be a good use of the tool which, on the contrary, boosts it.”