For many shoppers, fashion is now experienced primarily through a screen — discovered on social media, watched on runway livestreams and purchased from a product photo. Fashion critic Eugene Rabkin argues in his new book that this shift has left the industry prioritising a garment's image over the garment itself, hollowing out creativity and quality along the way. At the same time, as AI generated imagery floods the feed, a counter-movement is emerging: luxury brands are commissioning painters and illustrators, hosting phone-free dinners and building hands-on experiences designed to pull customers back into the physical world.
In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by Diana Pearl, BoF's US Editor, and Marc Bain, BoF's UK Editor and technology correspondent, to discuss whether this renewed emphasis on human creativity and craft is a meaningful response to fashion's image-first culture — or just the next trend cycle.
Key Insights:
- As consumers increasingly interact with clothing through small screens rather than in person, Bain explains that subtler markers of quality have lost their power to communicate value. "As we interact more with clothing through imagery rather than the physical garments themselves, the logo becomes more important... Now the logo is just the easiest thing to identify. And that has become the most important thing on a garment."
- Drawing on a concept borrowed from French theory, Bain says the gap between a product's online image and its physical reality has left some shoppers disillusioned — a dynamic he says extends well beyond fast fashion. "It doesn't just apply to Shein..Eugene Rabkin's argument is that it's come to apply to a whole lot of fashion, including luxury fashion... There's been this decline in quality over the years."
- Bain says and Rabkin are careful not to cast technology as the villain, noting that AI's impact depends entirely on how brands choose to use it. " Technology is amoral. It's a tool..And it's really how it's used that is more important."
- Pearl points to a wave of luxury brands hiring painters, illustrators and sculptors as a direct response to overly polished, perfected imagery that technology has made ubiquitous — a trend only accelerated by AI. e. "Being perfect and having just this picture-perfect imagery is no longer seen as aspirational. It's actually seen as, ‘slop’ … having that human-made art... is what feels now aspirational and special."
- As brands pull back from influencer-driven content blitzes in favour of intimate, phone-free events, Pearl says the playbook for measuring success has changed. . "It's all representative of this bigger shift that we're seeing away from volume and just get as much content as possible... towards the depth of connection."
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