AI could make fashion so much worse
Our media landscape is undergoing a tectonic shift – if human taste survives the revolution, who will hold the power to make and shape a trend?
This story is part of AI’M SCARED, a series in which we explore the impact – good and bad – of AI on fashion and the creative industries. Read more on the topic here: In an AI-driven world, taste is the ultimate currency.
By Thom Waite
The fashion trend, in 2025, seems to operate on a kind of magic. One minute you’ll be talking about a unique, vintage-style bag you saw on a stranger, wondering how many vintage shops-slash-Depop accounts you’ll have to trawl to find something similar, and the next it pops up in your Instagram feed, a digitally-mediated manifestation of your desires. Meanwhile, other trends seem conjured entirely out of the aether, appearing fully-formed with no rhyme, reason, or precedent – one day, they’re simply everywhere.
Are we really talking about magic here? Well, not really. The preternatural appearance of today’s fashion landscape has a lot more to do with the impenetrable algorithms and other ‘black box’ technologies that make it tick, as the framework for the virtual spaces we inhabit – where trends are made, circulated, and packaged for consumption. Then again, as the late British sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke once wrote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So even if today’s trends aren’t technically supernatural, they might as well be for most of us, who have little to no comprehension of how they actually happen.
It hasn’t always been this way. In the past, consumers held just as little sway over what was in and out of trend as they do today, but they could at least point at the people making the decisions – the little man behind the curtain, like in The Wizard of Oz. These gatekeepers and tastemakers were typically designers, or else other prominent members of the fashion elite, like critics, editors, and stylists. Take, for example, a story from The Face in 1998: planning a medieval-fantasy-themed shoot starring Alexander McQueen, stylist Isabella Blow realised that all the clothes would have to be vintage or film props, unless she could convince the fashion world that chainmail was next season’s big trend. “So she went round, whispering in all the designers’ ears, and the next season the collections featured medieval armour,” says photographer Sean Ellis, in wall text for Culture Shift, the National Portrait Gallery’s recent exhibition on the music and style magazine. “Izzy literally initiated the fashion for those designers.”