The Edit is our new weekly show, where Social Editor Grace Robinson quizzes editor-in-chief Ben Hanson on five of the most significant fashion and technology stories from the past seven days.
This edition covers: the UK’s under-sixteen social media ban and the race to reach Gen Alpha; Meta’s Ray-Ban-free smart glasses and Snap’s premium AR specs; SSENSE replacing its creative teams with AI; REI’s two-handlebar AI ad and Meta’s auto-enrolled ad tool; and how a record-breaking European heatwave reminds us that fashion needs to react to a changing world.
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NB. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Grace Robinson: Welcome to The Edit from The Interline, the show where we run quickfire analysis on our pick of the most important fashion and beauty technology stories from the last seven days. I’m Grace, the Social Editor, and I’m joined by Ben, the Editor-in-Chief. Together we have less than twenty-five minutes to give you our analysis on the stories we think matter the most.
Ben Hanson: Good morning, Grace. Great to see you.
Grace Robinson: Amazing. Shall I get straight into the questions?
Ben Hanson: Let’s go for it. The one thing I’ll flag: I said we’d have theme music this week. We don’t have theme music this week — we’re still working on the selection. Much harder than you think.
Grace Robinson: Modelling Australia’s approach, the UK government has just issued a ban on social media for under-sixteens, and it’s going to be enforced next year. It’s obviously still really early to know the true impact of how this will look in reality, but I think it already raises some really interesting questions — specifically, how fashion brands are going to market to younger consumers like Gen Alpha, now that they won’t be on social media as much.
I saw an interesting piece from Vogue suggesting that fashion brands may have to market via games, since younger people will be spending more time in gaming environments. I also saw a story from WWD about a partnership between Samsung and Glance: they’re going to be doing AI-driven interactive shopping and incorporating it into all of the TVs Samsung has made in the last six years.
To me, this feels like it could be linked to this change too, but I wanted to get your take on it.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. As a bit of background preparation for this, I had to brush up on my definition of what constitutes Gen Alpha. In my case, it’s essentially my kids — they were all born in the 2010s and onwards, which puts them in this prime teenage and sub-teenage category. And that’s a pretty big category for fashion brands. It’s a demographic these companies very much want to market to.
A lot of attention-based marketing is very focused on social media, because social media is the channel that’s done the most effective job of capitalising on the attention economy. If you listen to any of the executives from Instagram and TikTok — and, to a lesser extent, YouTube and Netflix — they’ll tell you that their biggest competition is sleep. Not just for this Gen Alpha demographic, but for everybody, because there’s only so much attention to go around.
I’m a little conflicted on the social media ban in general, but what it effectively does is remove a share of that attention economy from fashion brands. So if you’re targeting those kinds of consumers, you’re suddenly competing for a slice of a smaller pie.
So people who aren’t watching TikTok, scrolling Instagram or scrolling through YouTube — where are they going to go? The parent in me would love to say they’re going to read more, go outside and ride BMX bikes, or whatever I did when I was younger. The reality is that attention is going to move to whatever other screens and surfaces are available to them. Those screens and surfaces will constitute gaming, to some extent. I know fashion brands have done marketing activations through Roblox and Fortnite in the past.
Those have always been second fiddle to what they do through TikTok, Instagram and so on, because the share of attention there was lower. I think we’ll start to see that rebalance — and I think that Vogue article is correct on that point.
The other big thing, though, is that young people are not going to go from doom-scrolling straight to reading books and going outside. That’s a very naive, idealistic way of looking at it. They’re going to watch more TV. And if you look elsewhere in the news this week, Instagram in particular is making a bigger play for the television. They’re starting to introduce more of their own scripted shows, and to put more tools in the hands of creators to make content that isn’t bound to a square or a vertical rectangle, but is designed to be formatted for 16:9 or 16:10 displays. So this is absolutely the way things are going, I think.
There’s only so much attention to go around, and when it moves away from the surfaces it’s currently on, it’s going to go to more screens — which does create an opportunity for brands.
Meta drops Ray-Ban, Snap goes high-end — the wearables split
Grace Robinson: The next story caused a lot of online discourse this week. Meta has just released three new styles of its smart glasses across seven different colourways — but this time, Ray-Ban was nowhere to be seen. Probably the most standout of the new styles was a collaboration with Kylie Jenner, whose style has a very Gen Z, Y2K aesthetic, which makes you think they’re trying to target younger consumers with this release. Overall, Meta has reduced the price of its smart glasses by $80, but I believe Kylie Jenner’s comes in at around $500.
Interestingly, there was also news this week that Snap has released its own augmented-reality smart glasses — but theirs come in at over $2,000. These are obviously two very different approaches to wearables, so I wanted to get your take on all of this and what you think is going on with wearables generally.
Ben Hanson: Yeah, it’s very interesting. I’d argue that the partnership between Meta and EssilorLuxottica — the company behind Ray-Ban and a lot of the other eyewear brands you know and recognise — was as much about manufacturing expertise and manufacturing clout as it was about branding. EssilorLuxottica absolutely know how to make a pair of glasses, they know how to do it at a price point, and they have an effective monopoly on acetate supply and other things. So that was as much a pragmatic, production-driven relationship as it was a branding one.
Now, I don’t necessarily think the people buying the Meta glasses particularly care about the brand. The reason I’m saying that is most people seem to buy those Meta Ray-Bans because they’re the simplest way to get a camera on your face and a decent pair of — not earbuds, but listening experiences. That seems to be what people buy them for. I suspect the AI interactivity portion is a distant second to what most people actually want, and that people liked, to some extent, that they looked like a pair of Wayfarers — but I don’t think that was the major buying criterion. So I don’t expect Meta to see a big fall-off by dropping the branding here, and I suspect they’ll continue to benefit from the manufacturing relationship they’ve built up. Meta and EssilorLuxottica are also mutual investors, so it’s not a complete severing of ways — but it is a bit of a testament to what people actually want from glasses.
What do people actually want from intelligent glasses? I’d argue it’s functionality, more than anything else. It’s the camera and the earphones. And if you can get those at a compelling price point, wonderful. I don’t see anybody particularly caring about the Kylie Jenner ones, to be honest. I’m not Gen Z — I’m an older millennial, so it’s certainly not my demographic. Let’s see how that plays out, and whether the bare-bones functionality trumps the celebrity partnership.
Now, the Snap specs are a different prospect. Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, is married to a supermodel — I forget which; you’re better with your celebrity gossip than I am. They launched those with a number of fashion models advertising them. They are horrible to look at. I don’t think there’s a world where anybody could conceivably call those fashion items. Could they pull off an AirPods or a Dynamic Island sort of thing, where it becomes cool precisely because it looks bad? Maybe.
But the interesting part about the Snap specs is that they’re extremely expensive, because they’re probably the first successful iteration of somebody really doing augmented reality.
They have a display in them, which is one thing the standard Meta glasses don’t have — although there is a Meta Ray-Ban display version, which is a lot more expensive. They’re the first true augmented reality, in the sense that you’re overlaying digital information on the real world.
Now, I suspect Snap has its own branding problem on a lot of that side of things; I can’t see that many people gravitating towards it. But again, if people are buying these things for function — if what you want is a camera on your face and a decent pair of headphones — then there’s a more accessible and affordable option for you. And if what you want is the bleeding edge of what can be accomplished with proper augmented reality, there’s an option for you there too.
So I guess wearables are diverging — certainly on price point, and definitely on functionality level. I think we’ll see branding start to matter less and less. How that plays out for the Google, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker partnership, we’ll see.
SSENSE swaps its creative team for AI
Grace Robinson: The next story features a brand that’s been in the headlines a lot over the past couple of years. SSENSE, the online multi-brand retailer, filed for bankruptcy protection in August 2025, I believe, and then at the start of this year the founders bought the business back. Really interestingly, they’ve been in the headlines again this week — specifically, an article from The Logic explaining how SSENSE has just let go of a lot of its creative team: photographers, make-up artists, and photo retouchers as well.
They were putting this down to the fact that they’ve incorporated more AI into their creative workflows. It’s the kind of story we’re hearing more and more, but the most interesting part of what The Logic reported is that SSENSE apparently said incorporating AI lets them create a more distinct visual language and point of view that will help their business.
I really wanted to get your take: do we believe this? Or do you think it’s just a way for the business to cut costs, given how much they’ve struggled over the past few years?
Ben Hanson: Yeah, this is a really interesting one, because you have a business that’s truly been through the wringer — and it’s been through the wringer because multi-brand retail online has proven to be a very difficult model to make work well, and to establish any kind of differentiation in.
This is unquestionably about cutting costs. The thing I actually like about this story — it’s reporting from a single publication that we haven’t been able to find validation for elsewhere, so take it with some amount of salt, although they do seem to have spoken to people who work directly within SSENSE, so it seems believable — is that it’s at least honest.
You’ll quite often see brands say, “We’re using generative AI in our consumer-facing content — whether we label it or not, whether it’s mandatory to label it or not — but we’re still keeping photographers on staff, still keeping make-up artists on staff, still keeping lighting teams on staff, still keeping the contracts we have with studios and agencies that do that kind of work.” I don’t understand how a brand can say, “I’m turning to generative AI for all of my consumer-facing content creation because it’s cheaper at a unit-economic level than photography, but I’m still going to maintain everything else.” I feel that this is lip service that will play out badly over time.
You see the same thing from the technology providers here — people saying, “This is not a replacement for models. This is not a replacement for photographers — it’s a way for creative directors to do different things.” I struggle to square that circle. If every brand is a commercial enterprise, and photography is enough of a cost centre that it’s this compelling to automate, then eventually you will lose those people, and those skill sets will start to disappear. So, again, it’s at least honest in this instance.
And as a company that’s had a chequered few years, I think that’s absolutely the reason behind a lot of this. Now, the “distinct point of view” thing is interesting to me, because it suggests there was some kind of limitation or issue in the way they were approaching photography by traditional means. If you couldn’t establish a clean, consistent, unique and differentiated point of view using the traditional tools, I don’t see how using AI — which just replicates the traditional tools and gives you ersatz versions of them — gets you a distinct point of view. Unless what you want is to consolidate and centralise creative decision-making power in the hands of a small number of people, rather than distributing it across a massive pool. I could see that companies like this might have had a too-many-cooks situation when trying to produce a clear, distinct visual identity.
You’re trying to do it with people who’ve worked with you, or alongside you, for a long time. Everybody has their own opinions; everybody’s getting pulled in different directions. Contrasted with that, if you just give a Marketing Director or a Creative Director full rein to go and generate all of this, you’ll get a more consistent, individualised point of view. I’d argue you still need all of the traditional photography skills, expertise and input you’d get otherwise — but it’s an interesting one, because it’s so honest about an area where I feel a lot of people are dishonest.
REI’s two-handlebar AI ad — and who’s to blame
Grace Robinson: Next is a really interesting story about REI, the multi-brand sports and outdoor retailer. They received a lot of backlash online this week after customers noticed they’d used AI-generated imagery for one of their social media ad campaigns. The image that sparked it promoted a bike brand called Van Rysel, and it showed a woman standing outside with a bike — but the bike had two sets of handlebars, so obviously an AI-generated image. Consumers were particularly annoyed because they felt it went against the brand’s sustainability ethos. But interestingly, when REI was confronted, they put the blame back on Meta, saying they’d been automatically enrolled into Meta’s personalised AI programme, and that this is what caused the inaccurate image.
Again, I wanted your take — do we believe this? Do we think it’s true? It seems a bit confusing how this could happen — surely a brand would have control or visibility over it?
Ben Hanson: So, I do believe it. The reason I believe it is that REI have very good credentials and very, very strict criteria for the brands they’ll stock. People are angry with them because they feel that it breaks a promise — a retail promise. I’ve seen REI’s intake documents before, and they are rigorous.
This is a company that genuinely does care about the products it stocks, so from that point of view, I believe it. From the other point of view — for people who criticise this kind of thing — you should ask yourself: do you really think a brand cares so little about its external communication that it would let an image pass scrutiny where a bike had two sets of handlebars? That would suggest every company is incredibly lazy about what they market. Now, I’m sure some are. Without question, that’s out there. But I don’t believe REI is that company. I believe it’s the kind of company that controls its narrative the same way it controls its assortment and the products it stocks.
In general, people need to give brands a little credit here, and recognise that if they’ve prided themselves on what they stock and how they communicate in the past, that’s not suddenly going to change with the advent of AI.
So if you do believe it, what do you believe happened?
This is an ad that ran on Meta’s ad network — a ring-fenced version of the usual demand-platform, programmatic ad-buy setup. But it also seems to have been an output of Meta’s programmatic ad-creation AI. Their vision is essentially to offer you the whole stack. They’ll say, “Tell us what your products are, tell us what you’re selling. We’ll not only pair you with people who have the interest and intent and fit the demographic — we’ll generate the ads for you as well. Just give us one image and we’ll generate fifty different variations aligned with people’s geographies, backgrounds, ethnicities, preferences and so on.” So you get to something approaching personalised advertising.
Now, what REI is saying — and what we’ve heard from other brands before, smaller brands in particular — is that this is opt-out. So if you’re part of Meta’s programmatic advertising in the traditional sense, you get automatically opted into their programmatic content-creation pipeline. Which, again, I can believe. If you look at the type of company Meta is, and at their stated objective with their whole ad-tech stack — “we’ll do the whole thing for you” — I can certainly believe it’s being done on an opt-out basis.
This is further evidence that people really don’t like to see generative AI in their advertising — but it also muddies the waters, because, yes, of course you’re going to be annoyed by a bike with two sets of handlebars, or somebody with six fingers, or an extra leg. That’s not the state of the art for AI. The state of the art for AI is the stuff you don’t notice. You and I have talked about this before — it’s the PDP images and videos that you assume are real, and that aren’t currently labelled.
If you’re angry about AI, fine — and I understand a lot of it. But direct your anger at the places where it’s actually being practised at its frontier level, rather than getting so hung up on these kinds of stories. They make good headlines, but they’re much more complicated and nuanced than that, and they misrepresent what AI in advertising actually looks like.
Dressing for a record-breaking heatwave
Grace Robinson: If you’re watching this week’s Edit on YouTube, or if you’re in the UK or Europe generally, you’ll know we’re experiencing a massive heatwave. This is actually the second record-breaking heatwave of 2026, and many are saying that 35°C to 40°C-plus summers are going to become more common.
Being in London this week and seeing how people are adapting to the heat — in terms of what they wear and what they do — really got me thinking: how do you think this kind of climate change is going to impact fashion as we move forward?
Ben Hanson: Yeah. For anyone who’s not watching this on YouTube, I look very rumpled — I’m wearing a linen shirt, and I’ve had to close my window because somebody outside has decided to mow the lawn. In this room — and I should say, for American audiences — we’re talking in the 90s Fahrenheit, thereabouts; it’s been 100 in London.
That kind of heat is already changing the way brands think about their assortments and collections. It’s changing the materials people use, the cuts they put together, the emphasis on breathability and relaxed fit, and so on. Within the traditional realm of things, it’s also exposing the limits between companies that want to be more agile and responsive and the ones that actually are. If you’re set up to produce hundreds or thousands of new styles a week, and you can do it on a turnkey, reactive basis, you can react to these kinds of things. You can get these things in stock within a meaningful time frame, shuffle inventory across channels, and so on.
I’m not in London — I’m in Manchester — but I imagine if you go into a shop in London, anyone worth their salt will have done a lot of merchandise reallocation and store repositioning, putting all the lightweight garments right near the entrance. I’ve seen a lot of people carrying umbrellas to stay out of the sun, which is a first in the UK for me. So presumably that’s happening in London as well. It’s manifesting itself in the traditional product design, development and assortment-building side of things.
The other place we’re going to see this manifest is more in the “heat tech” areas. Everyone out on the street is carrying little handheld, battery-powered fans. The more forward-planning, prescient — and richer — among us have neck-mounted fans, or you’ve seen SharkNinja, who make everything, make something like a “chill pill”: a handheld fan that also has a cool plate you’re meant to put against your body. All of that is independent technology right now.
You and I talked last week about the beauty and cosmetics industry being able to sell devices, and how fashion doesn’t have the opportunity to sell devices quite as much. It does now. Fashion has the opportunity to forge partnerships and build its own branded versions of these standalone devices, and to start integrating more of these features into garments as well. I’m sure plenty of people would buy a garment with one of those Sony-style neck-mounted fans built in, blowing air into your shirt. I think that’s a fast-emerging category.
I’ll close by saying it is very hot here. I’m also very glad we’re not in France, or — as it’s about to be — Germany, or somewhere else where it’s even hotter. Generally speaking, Europe is going through a process whereby our summertime climate is changing pretty markedly. We don’t have air conditioning, and there’s definitely a lot of back-and-forth about that in France at the moment.
That creates a potentially pretty captive market for fashion brands that want to tackle this — whether through branding standalone products or starting to integrate more heat tech into their garments — because we’re certainly not going to get air conditioning into every home in France, Germany, Italy or the UK within the next decade. It’s going to take a lot longer than that.
Grace Robinson: I think this is the first year I’ve actually wanted a handheld fan, so I’m really interested to see how this evolves.
Ben Hanson: Yeah — and if you want to sell me a shirt with a fan built into it, I will buy it. I’ll make that commitment here and now. Grace, it’s been fun talking to you for another week. Looking forward to next week, when I’m making a fairly confident prediction that we’ll have theme music.
Grace Robinson: Amazing. Thanks, Ben.
Ben Hanson: Thank you.
