Hey, and welcome back to The Interline Podcast.
Today we’re talking about design. Not in the kind of vague, ineffable sense, but as one of the most essential disciplines in fashion, and also the one that’s undergoing the most forced transformation from commercial factors and from the rollout of technology.
At The Interline, we work with both freelance digital designers and educators several times a year. So, we understand the tension that exists between the need for creative talent to stay on the bleeding edge of tech progression and the requirement for institutions to develop long-term curriculums and to teach tools that have a real lifespan.
Weekly discussions, debates, and technology insights for fashion and beauty professionals, hosted by The Interline’s Editor-in-Chief, Ben Hanson.
Find daily editorials, reports, analysis, and stories at The Interline.
From building repeatable systems to constantly updating their pipelines, seasoned and incoming designers are both working at the bleeding edge. What are they finding there? And what does it mean for the future of hybrid skills, and the balance between 3D and AI?
To answer those questions and more, Ben talks to Andrea Doering.
Today, I’m bringing on someone who does both independent design and teaching of digital skills to designers, Andrea Doering. She’s a multi-hyphenate creative lead and digital designer, as well as a visiting lecturer to design schools across Germany. Together, we’re going to get into how the next generation of talent feels about technology versus tradition. We’ll talk about the role that AI is actually playing in creativity. And we’re going to discuss what the longer term future looks like for the skills pipeline industry-wide.
Let’s get rolling.
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NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Okay, Andrea Doering, welcome to The Interline Podcast.
Hello, Ben Hanson. Thank you for having me.
Ooh, full name as well, surname and everything. I like it. We can drop the surnames as we go.
As a bit of an intro, walk us through what your typical working day looks like at the moment. Because you have a lot of strings to your bow. You’re working on a lot of things. It’s hard to tell whether they’re simultaneous or sequential. Tell me what your typical day looks like.
Great. Being a freelance digital designer and educator, my days look differently according to whether it is lecture time during the semester or not, and I’m actively teaching, and whether I work on one or more freelance projects at what kind of stage. For example, a year ago I taught multiple courses at two different universities while in parallel working on a full-time senate funded digitisation project with a tight deadline. So my days were off, I worked late nights, weekends and you know I’ve been cutting down on that a little bit.
Currently I am preparing next semester’s courses which start in two weeks [at the time of recording], writing course concepts, semester schedules, defining themes and submission requirements. In addition, I’m updating course material to match the latest software updates, which is always quite a lot. And also I test new workflows and apps in order to decide whether to include them in the course content or not.
One of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you was the life of a freelancer and particularly somebody who has their feet in the world of education as well is very much a life of experimenting with new things and very much a life of being able to shift gears fairly, fairly constantly. So at The Interline we’ve worked with freelance designers a bunch of times across our reports and things where we’ve commissioned work from people. And I’m always impressed by how kind of close to the metal and how evolving their pipelines and their processes and things are and how fast those things change. I guess you don’t remain a successful freelancer unless you’re willing to stay at the cutting edge of things?
Yeah, definitely. It’s also the software and the tools to some extent dictate your schedule. For example, at the beginning of last semester, CLO3D had a huge update and virtually overnight we had to deal with a new software altogether because I couldn’t step back to an older version. So you have to keep up. You have to be, you know, in the know.
Yeah, and I think this is one of the things that is fundamentally different when you think about teaching. It’s one of the things that’s fundamentally different between teaching traditional disciplines, you know, the art of merchandising, for example, evolves steadily to keep pace with new channels and the pace of culture and new systems and everything. The art of pattern making evolves. It doesn’t flip on a dime when you get a new point release of software or if we put ourselves in the AI context, everybody will say, you know, this latest model changes everything. This latest point release of Claude Opus or whatever is a fundamentally different way of working. You need to retool everything that you do.
And I think from an educational point of view, that’s especially interesting for younger people who are acquiring fashion skills at the moment is that you have a block of fairly unchanging traditional disciplines and then you have a block of new digital disciplines that can change week by week. That, to me, is a very interesting sort of tension at the centre of what it means to work in fashion, be a fashion professional.
Definitely. Also, one affects the other to some extent. Because today students are trained to visualise their outputs in a very different way than, for example, when I was a fashion student. I didn’t learn all the visual tools to simply showcase my outputs. And that today is also a huge part of education. I mean, apart from design and digital design tools, simply showing what you’re doing has become essential in education as well.
Yeah. Okay. Fantastic.
Now, I recently did an episode, which I think went live a few days before we’re recording this one, with a friend of mine, Karinna Grant, where we were trading definitions of what constitutes digital fashion and digital product creation. So you’ve hinted at 3D so far. For us at The Interline, digital product creation is the term that we use to capture the whole kind of 3D native and extended ecosystem of design, development, sourcing, production, and promotion. Everyone kind of has their own taxonomy, it seems, like their own way of phrasing things when it comes to capturing the workflows and the use cases for 3D.
You use a phrase that I’ve not come across before, which is ‘virtual couture’. How do you define that? And do you think it differs from maybe how I’m thinking about digital product creation or how someone else is thinking about digital fashion? Or is it just your own name for something that people are going to be familiar with?
Alright, so let’s clarify this. Virtual Couture is the name of the senate-funded cultural heritage digitisation project I co-wrote and worked on creatively in 2024-2025 at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin. So Virtual Couture basically refers to the fact that the origin of the digitised virtual garments are haute couture garments, which come with a number of distinctive characteristics. An haute couture garment is custom fitted and usually made to order by a client. As a result, the garment may be asymmetric, feature irregularities to accustom the wearer and most likely distinctive elaborate hand executed techniques, which are not so easily translated into digital as they live outside of standardised, industrial, realised garment production.
That’s a very interesting way to frame it, because I think digital product creation, the name kind of implies the fact that it’s a repetitive standardised activity for the most part. If you are creating products, you have a goal of bringing a large number of them to market, usually. That you’re not normally dealing in units of one bespoke garment and so on. And the sewing operations, everything else involved in it are fairly well standardised and unitised and so on.
I guess yours is, this is what you would, if you worked in automotive, these are your halo vehicles and things which are the cutting edge of craft, whether it’s historic or contemporary. And those are things that don’t exist in the standard pipelines. But I do think it’s an interesting exercise to test the standard pipelines by seeing how well they can accommodate these things.
How did you go about this digitisation process, then? So taking something that has all of those characteristics that you talked about and using tools that don’t have built-in affordances for those things, what does the work look like in the middle there?
Well, you try and you fail. It’s been a very long iterative process. You know, you go step by step and see what works and then you adjust and you explore. But let me add something. From my perspective haute couture is fashion and virtual couture is digital fashion. And you know, if you consider, if you include into DPC the idea of custom-made products, virtual couture could also be DPC. That having said, Dani Loftus considered her creations for DRAUP virtual couture. Now I’m sure that there are more digital fashion artists who would, you know, agree on the subject.
Yeah, when you think about digital fashion as a platform for self-expression and uniqueness, I would agree with that. I’ve actually always looked at digital fashion as its own discipline that way, which is similar to how you would look at mass market, ready to wear off the rack versus couture. Without wanting to get too bogged down in semantics about how we define these things, when we just think back to what you talked about from an education point of view, you know, working with young designers, how interested are the younger folks – and I’m saying this as somebody in my mid-40s – in that sort of digital expression and that technology side of things compared to the traditional garment engineering and technical skills?
Do you find that people see those as a logical pairing? Do you find that you have students who want to focus purely on tradition, students who want to focus purely on digital? I’m keen to get a read on how the emerging kind of cohort of talent thinks about this.
Since I’ve been teaching at different types of universities, the answer to that question very much depends on the type of institute – whether it’s a university of applied sciences or an art school and also on the course of study and I also believe on the country and continent. So I currently teach at the AMD, Akademie Mode & Design, which is a private fashion school with multiple locations across Germany. And my students are fifth and sixth semester fashion design and design management students that can choose between different labs. I’m teaching the virtual lab one and two.
So my students explicitly choose technology and yes, they’re very interested in, you know, creating in digital, but I’d say they are equally interested in traditional engineering and garment making, so that sits side by side. How much they favour the digital look actually depends from semester to semester. That being said, many students are interested in digital. What actually keeps them away from taking the subject is that it involves a lot of work and skill, which comes on top of everything else. So other subjects are simply less work intense or easier to fulfill successfully.
Mm-hmm. We do hear a lot in 3D in particular, if you want to pursue that craft as an expert, then there’s a fairly steep learning curve. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know CLO, Browzwear, Style3D, these companies invest a lot in education, both institutional and individual and grassroots. It doesn’t address the fact that nobody is born a 3D designer. And even if you are an existing fashion designer, creative or technical, acquiring 3D skills is supplemental to the skills that you’re already working to acquire. So I think what you’re saying does reflect what we hear in industry as well.
Yeah, but let me add something. In fashion technology schools, I believe that this is different because when digital is part of the curriculum instead of being optional, it’s perceived as being integral and therefore also receives higher recognition. Therefore, from my experience, the interest in technology is linked to the type of school.
Also, I think we will see a shift when Gen Alpha enters higher education. Their affinity to digital is even stronger than that of Gen Z. For Gen Alpha, digital is normal in their lives and they move fluently between physical and digital space. So that actually may have an impact on the industry and how digital is being integrated in the future.
Yes, and that does kind of lead me to the question I have about AI. Well, one of the first questions I have about AI. So if I understand it correctly, you’re teaching kind of a cross tool approach – a pipeline that includes both 3D and AI because, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I’m wrong, but, your perspective seems to be that the outcome and the creative intent should be what matter and that the tools are a means to get there, however you combine them.
That’s an interesting and maybe slightly out of lockstep idea, you know, the idea that AI is a tool like any other. Because I think there’s a good amount of designers and people out in the world in general who would argue that, well, either they’re not particularly keen on AI for artistic purposes or they are and they think it’s actually fundamentally more disruptive and, you know, architecturally different than – and culturally different than – any other tool that’s come before.
What’s your take on that and does that change with your Gen Z and Gen Alpha and so on? Because it feels to me like, I don’t know, I go back and forth on this. There are days where I think AI is just software and I just frame it like a software analyst, which is my past. And then there are days where I do buy into the idea that AI is a step change in the way that things are done and that treating it as a tool like any other is playing it down. I’m keen to get your take.
Okay, I think I would agree with both takes. I do believe it is both and it very much depends on how you perceive AI. Whether it’s, you know, generative AI being used to create an image or AI being used on a much more structural, managerial kind of level. There is a huge difference in my opinion. And I thought I’d give a different kind of perspective on this. A few weeks ago I was at the opening of a big James Nachtwey exhibition here in Berlin. James Nachtwey is one of the most acclaimed and renowned war photographers and he was present at the opening and gave an hour-long interview and the audience afterwards was given a chance to ask questions. The second question was coming from a fellow photographer wanting to know his opinion on AI. James said, and I was really surprised, AI is a tool. He has friends who work with AI artistically and the important thing is to use AI with integrity.
He also mentioned that unless we are really transparent with AI, future generations will not know, looking back, what has been real and what was fake. So unless we treat AI with transparency, we will alter how our time will be perceived in the future.
I think that’s an interesting take. I think as well, as an analyst, it’s easy for me to kind of sit here and go, well, the creative community is not embracing AI. They fear it or what have you. In practice, speaking to brands, heads of design and so on, in fact, we just published an opinion piece today which was taken from our digital product creation report about where AI is appropriate, where 3D is appropriate. Actually, a lot of the design community, just as the photographer there, sees AI as a valuable tool for them. They are not necessarily pushing back against generative AI. In some cases, that’s because they see it as inevitable and they have to ride the wave. In other cases, it’s because they genuinely see it as a tool that they want to add to their creative toolkit. I feel like there’s a line somewhere in what we’re talking about here, which is what you try to do with it.
Because I know you’ve spoken before about the rush for people, companies in particular, wanting to use AI to substitute for reality. There’s a huge and growing market for generative image models designed to be used to replace traditional photo shoots for selling products. There are a lot of software solutions pointed at that problem. What they’re trying to do is take a human process, a multi-human process, and just recreate it and automate it and speed it up using AI. That seems to be valuable for them. That seems to be something that they get a lot of return on investment on. It also seems to be taking us to a place where getting a professional look, whether it’s an image or video, is trivial.
Adam Mosseri, who’s head of Instagram, had an end of year message at 2025, saying that creating perfect polished images that look real is now table stakes for everybody. And companies are definitely leaning into that. But then there are people who look at AI as an opportunity to do something visually distinct and visually different.
Where do you land on that sort of continuum? Do you see the value in AI as a way to kind of explode the beginning and end of the funnel where you are using it to replicate reality in a more efficient way? Or do you see it as fitting in a toolset but in a way that creates visually distinct and different outcomes instead of just making it faster to get the same kind of homogenised look that everybody has?
I think a significant part of the backlash that AI has received comes, as you mentioned, from the way it has been deployed. Particularly when it’s used to imitate or substitute reality. The shift from 2023 to 2026 has truly changed. In ‘23 it was about early experiments, including my own, leaning into exploratory, open-ended creativity. And the workers were often surreal and expressive and, you know, faulty, unexpected and definitely less polished. It didn’t pretend to be real. Now, as the tools improved, the direction shifted to an increasingly flawless realism and polish. And that’s where tension began to intensify and audiences were truly uneasy and to some extent opposed against AI.
You’ve had a podcast with Marcus Holmstrom and he mentioned that when brands propose virtual collaborations, he challenges them to ask what’s possible in virtual that cannot exist in real life. So for me that question applies even more strongly to AI. When you use AI to create something you couldn’t possibly create in reality, audiences are much more favourable of welcoming that kind of output because it doesn’t challenge reality. So it’s got a lot to do with how we use AI, what’s our goal, what are we going to do with it?
Yeah, I think, not wanting to sound too cynical, some of it is just a matter of imagination. If you put a tool in front of somebody and say you can generate anything you can imagine, and it will look to varying degrees of quality depending on how good you are at prompting and what models you’re using and so on, that’s when you discover how much imagination a person or a company has. Because if the extent of it is, well, we can take what we do now and do it faster and cheaper. Then I’m not saying that that person or company is bereft of imagination. I am saying that they are looking at a creative tool and opportunity through a primarily commercial lens, which …fine, brands exist to make money, retailers exist to make money. They are not charities. But that does seem to be the flash point.
I think you’re right. I’m actually in the middle of just finishing up a news analysis for this week which is looking at the backlash that Gucci have just received for inserting generated images into the promotion they’re doing around Milan Fashion Week. And that’s a prime example of this. It seems that people are angry about the idea that it’s not doing something that would be wildly prohibitively expensive to do in person or that would be impossible to do in person. It’s just taking a shortcut to get a result that could have been done another way.
And I think you’re right. I think you’ve got the correct read on where the backlash is coming from and where the line is drawn between creative and commercial uses of AI.
It’s also a wasted chance, you know? I mean, AI does have potential, fatally. And if you’re just ignoring that potential, well, that’s a shame, really.
Mm-hmm, I think that’s a correct read. The other concern I think a lot of people share about AI, and it’s one I’ve seen you express, and it’s one I’ve talked about and thought about before, is the idea of role compression, or talent compression, where you’re slowly running out of entry-level positions because AI can automate those. That raises your expectations as a company for what your previously junior creatives could do. And it compresses at the top end where you would previously have had your superstar designers doing small volumes of their own hand created output who then become more curators of the output of AI.
This is a different concept to just using AI to get rid of jobs because what it implies is you slice the top off and you slice the bottom off of the talent pipeline and you push people into a narrow sort of set of fairly light touch automated normalised tasks in the middle. How far do you see that playing out and in that scenario what do you think becomes the role of the designer if that plays out?
Let me start by saying that this shift of the designer becoming the, let’s say, operator or curator didn’t start with AI. It started long before when companies introduced creative buying and designers became more operators and really designers just, you know, executing what others put in front of them. So AI simply accelerated that process. Now it’s become so much easier to create huge amounts of design at speed and somebody else may judge the quality of them. So that has been an ongoing process and AI acted as a huge accelerator.
On the other hand, I believe that there are still market segments that may not be immune but less affected by that process and development. Starting with prêt-à-porter but not only. Also every company that puts a lot of time and effort in design development because of the products they sell, I think they’re somewhat more immune to this shift happening than mass market companies.
So tied to this as well, so we’ve talked about 3D, we’ve talked about AI. I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of brands at the moment who are questioning where they put 3D and whether they’ve put it in the right place to achieve what its stated goal is versus whether AI would be better slotted into that box.
Just to put a bit of context to it, if a hypothetical brand primarily uses 3D as a way to shorten the distance between designers having an idea and being able to share that idea with people, being able to get it to the point of sampling and adoption and so on, that’s quite, as we’ve talked about, quite a long circuitous process that requires a lot of talent, requires a lot of upskilling, requires a lot of staying on top of the latest version of software and so on. AI, if you want to just visualise an idea, is unquestionably cheaper, faster, and more direct.
But you then have the applications of 3D, that are what I would class as the enduring ones, which are the ones that are focused on accuracy, foundational data, anything that requires you to take a visualisation and make it more than a visualisation, strip the visual element away. I think the way Jaden from CLO put it in an interview for our DPC Report was, if you take your 3D and you remove the visual component of it, is it still valuable? I’m keen to get your perspective on that because with brands pulling back on 3D and with brands evaluating the role of AI in that sort of space, what do you think is the future of 3D?
Well, the first question would be those brands who are withdrawing from 3D, what have they been using 3D for? Because if you look at other industries like product design or architecture, I don’t see 3D being withdrawn at, you know, most stages except possibly for visualisation. They use 3D to design and visualise but mainly for design because they wouldn’t have any other way if you think of a building for example.
– Sorry to interrupt your flow, but that’s a really interesting comparison. So if you think of an architecture firm, for instance, like Archiviz, architectural visualisation, the only place that I would see and I think have seen generative images being used is in place of hand-drawn sketches, like pure theme vibe based stuff that’s designed to showcase placement and approximate materials and inspiration and so on. I don’t think anybody in that sector is saying…
No way, of course not. But initially, 3D promised to cut costs and resources, which makes it an incredibly sustainable tool. When I first learned 3D, I thought, great, it’s replacing 2D CAD and that’s how it’s been done in other industries. So in fashion design we have design and, you know, using Illustrator and then we have 2D cut and 3D and then visualisation, marketing, etc. etc. So there are lots of departments and ideally in 3D you could design, you could create the patterns, tech packs, send it away and then you have those ecosystems within the software that allow for departments to communicate. So it very much depends on how a company is using 3D in my opinion. And I think that should shift. If 3D was to replace 2D cut or, I don’t know, they’d form an alliance that would make sure that 3D has a place to stay.
Yeah, I think one of the ways that you could look to protect is the wrong word because that implies that it doesn’t deserve a place, but I think you’re right that it does. But one of the ways to effectively kind of ringfence, safeguard, support 3D-DPC workflows is to codify, standardise, and scale them in a way that gives brands and their partners a logical, repeatable system for design, rather than just giving them a set of tools that requires a lot of upskilling, requires people to start from scratch every time, and just doing that in a digital, slightly faster way.
Have you explored anything in that space in the kind of systematisation, componentisation side of 3D?
Well, for Virtual Couture I had to develop a blueprint that was like a guideline or a repeatable system for reverse engineering archive fashion. So that compares a little bit to what you’ve just mentioned. But I believe, while it would be great to have standardised repeatable systems, companies and their management are so different from each other in the design workflows, that could become a problem with standardised workflows. I think it would be vital to inform management what 3D can actually do and what it is basically used for. If you see younger creative directors coming in, they seem to embrace 3D or technology more and more. So possibly the fashion industry is just slow in adopting.
Yeah, I think that’s possibly fair. I think the other element of 3D, as what we talked about before, is as a foundational part of the data layer for fashion. And I think one of the ways that that could be built upon, extrapolated, is for companies and the engines, to be fair, developers of the software, but mainly developers of the simulation engines, to really lean into the idea of simulation. Putting progressively more power in the hands of design and development teams to like virtually test and refine their ideas beyond fabric stretch and compression and so on. I’ve spoken to multi-product category brands over the years, some of whom have written for The Interline, who are interested in saying, well, we make a lot of different outdoor products and we’d quite like to be able to virtualise some of the field testing and stuff that we do. That’s just one example of how you could push simulation.
Do you see potential there as well? If we were to say that the AI has a lot of possibility space to grow into from a visualisation point of view, 3D perhaps has a similar amount of space to stretch its legs when it comes to simulation as well. Does that feel like something that’s workable and authentic to you or am I off base?
Well, last week I was in London at the CLO & Epic Social-
So was I! How did we manage to not see one another?
Well, there were a lot of people there.
Yeah, very true.
I talked to Yao Yao, who was one of the panelists working for Vivienne Westwood. She’s actually working with one of my former professors at Vivienne Westwood. She explained how she simulates and tests designs with both design and pattern making. I think what you just mentioned is already happening, only that there may be a shift to, like you said, outdoor companies who really invest in design development as well as prêt-à-porter companies who also have a strong interest in really testing their product. So there might just be a shift in market segment at the moment, which in return might be adopted by other market segments in due time. But I think that’s definitely happening and also really, really helpful. So yeah, I completely agree.
Okay, I’m with you. I’m with you. Second to last question. You’ve talked about the Virtual Couture exercise for the museum and you’ve talked about the systems and things behind that. That’s an artistic application of your process and your repeatable system and things. There are also a lot of storied heritage luxury brands who have extensive physical back catalogs going back decades or centuries, that they would like to digitise and extract techniques and craft and materials and things from, but that they can’t physically destroy or they don’t want to physically destroy, which would be required in a lot of those cases to understand how some of those garments and things were put together.
Do you see value in taking that sort of digital twin approach that you did in the Virtual Couture project and bringing that into those sort of commercial applications for companies that have those big libraries and archives?
Definitely and it’s also already happening. Lots of companies, like I believe Alexander McQueen was one of the first to digitise one of the big collections from McQueen. And brands like Lanvin and Gautier and Dior, they’re all building 3D and AI teams and also start digitising the archives. So yes, because you have the chance to preserve something that is soon becoming too frail to be handled or even exhibited, or being put on a person. And you discover all kinds of things like finishing techniques, printing techniques and that also gives fresh ideas to those brands. So it’s a two-way thing.
I agree. I think I’ve seen it talked about and seen it happening and it seems like something that does frame 3D in a much more useful way than just, it’s for new product development and it’s for shortening the distance between idea and visual presentation for new product development.
Final question, it’s a big one but I’m going to ask you for a quick answer on it, which is: what do you think is next for design as a discipline? What, what over the next couple of years do you think is going to characterize what it means to be a fashion designer?
Hybridity, I would guess. The ability to work across different media fluently, or at least having some knowledge across different media, also, and of course, learning and learning and learning, tools, tools, tools. But also, there may be a different mindset. I believe sustainability will rebound in the next month or year or something like that simply because it’s essential. So people will consider design again not only from a commercial perspective and not only from a self-expression perspective but also take into account a more global perspective, and that will affect product and design.
So the hybridity and incorporating social media on a daily basis as well as a more global approach will shift the views on design and eventually the product itself, I guess.
That’s a great summary. That’s a good place to bring us to a close, I think.
Andrea, I really enjoyed this conversation. I enjoy talking to people who work at the coalface, as it were, of 3D design outside of the confines of an individual brand. Because, like I said, at the top, it’s fascinating to see just how fast pipelines and workflows and things need to evolve. I also like talking to people in education, because it gives you a very up-to-the-minute read on how the next generation is framing things. It’s especially fun to talk to somebody who does both of those things. So thank you very much for your time.
Thank you so much for having me. It was a great pleasure.
Perfect.
And that’s the end of my conversation with Andrea. There’s a few things from there that are going to stick with me, especially the comparison between architecture and fashion when it comes to 3D maturity and to understanding where the long-term value of digital product creation probably lies.
We’ve got plenty more to come in the next few weeks too, so I’ll speak to you again soon.