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: Substack’s move into native sponsorships and what it means for fashion’s relationship with the platform; the UK’s latest change of prime minister and the case for shifting fashion and its technology out of London; anti-surveillance garments and the fashion response to always-on facial recognition; a new cotton–polyester recycling partnership and whether it can scale; and the ASA’s crackdown on ‘recycled’ advertising claims alongside emerging rules on labelling AI-generated imagery — five stories about who controls distribution, provenance and trust.
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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 a 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 our analysis on the stories we think really matter.
Ben Hanson: Hi, Grace. Good to see you again, and good to be doing this again. Let’s roll.
Substack — a platform in a different coat?
Grace Robinson: The first story is about Substack. Specifically, Substack have announced the next stage of their native sponsorship programme. This is really relevant for us because Balenciaga, the fashion brand, is one of the founding flagship partners, along with other tech companies including Granola, Uber and Polymarket.
Personally, as a creator myself, I’ve been back and forth on whether I should be on Substack or not, but fundamentally I’ve landed on the view that I should be, and I think it’s a really positive platform. I know that The Interline has chosen not to be on it, so I wanted to get your take on this story, and also hear what you think about fashion and Substack generally.
Ben Hanson: So you’re correct that The Interline is not on Substack. Some of that is laziness — we simply haven’t got around to it. But a big part of it is that I’m a firm believer in owning our own distribution. We are a website, and I’m old enough to be a website guy. When I started doing this in general, a website was what you created, because it was the thing you owned. It was a medium you could build, and a relationship with your audience that you could have directly.
There’ll be a lot of brands who come from the same era — a lot of fashion brands from the pre-platform era, from the start of e-commerce, where if you wanted to be on the web you had to do it yourself and own it yourself. I think that mindset carries through for a lot of companies. They see their website and their owned channels as the primary way of reaching the consumer. Then you have younger, more digitally savvy companies who see platforms as the way of reaching the consumer. And then you have another cohort who see the creators on those platforms as their route to consumers. You’ve gone through three degrees of separation there.
The vision behind this seems to be that if you’re a creator on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, you’re reliant on advertising and on brand deals. That’s how those platforms work — you don’t get paid anywhere near enough directly by YouTube or Instagram to go and create content, so you sign brand deals and build partnerships. Substack are now offering to take over a lot of the infrastructure: the bookings, the admin overhead, everything involved in finding those deals, as well as pairing potentially great advertisers with potentially great creators.
The key part, which isn’t directly spelled out but is implied in the way Substack has talked about algorithms and feeds before, is this: as a brand, if you want to work with a creator, great — you can forge that relationship. But that creator’s relationship with their eventual audience, the demographic you’re paying to reach, is then mediated by two entities. It’s mediated by the platform owner — your YouTube or your Instagram — and by an opaque algorithm that gets in the way. The promise of Substack is that you engage the creator, the creator has a direct relationship with their audience, and it gives you a much shorter and more authentic route to that.
Now, if I was going to straw-man this, I’d say that Substack looks an awful lot like a platform in a different coat. It has a different engagement metric and a more permissive structure — it lets people own their audience and more of their revenue. So there’s a part of me that feels this is a lateral step more than anything else for these kinds of companies. But I see a lot of creators and a lot of brands on Substack, and from a technology point of view it does seem poised to become one of the next big pillars of the way brands and consumers engage. So it’s an interesting one for sure.
Northern devolution — where fashion and its technology get made
Grace Robinson: The next story enters a space we don’t usually talk about, and that’s politics. Even our international listeners will probably know that we’re about to get our seventh Prime Minister in the last decade — I think I was something like sixteen or seventeen when we last had a Prime Minister serve a full term, which is remarkable.
There’s been a lot of upheaval in politics everywhere, but with the current situation in the UK it’s particularly interesting for our listeners, and it’s tied to the North–South divide we have here, because it’s also linked to the textile trade.
So we’re not about to make this a politics show, but I wanted to get your take, and have you give everyone a bit of an update on what’s going on and whether you think it has implications for fashion and fashion technology.
Ben Hanson: Yeah, it’s a good question. I also avoid talking about politics almost always, in polite society and at work, so it’s doubly interesting. For listeners outside the UK, you might not be able to tell mine and Grace’s accents apart, but Grace is in London and I’m in Manchester. The latest revolving door of prime ministers is interesting because the man about to step in as our next Prime Minister has been the Mayor of Manchester for the last decade or so.
Manchester, the city I live in, has gone through a massive regeneration. I think it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, and it’s quickly become a seat for a lot of media, finance and a huge amount of tech as well. The man poised to step in, Andy Burnham, is a big advocate for what we call devolution. A lot of the decision-making, the value creation — almost everything in the UK — is centralised in London, the same way it is in Paris in France, or Milan in Italy. He’s a big advocate for the idea that that shouldn’t necessarily be the case.
Your capital is your capital for a reason, but there’s a lot of industry that could and should diversify across the country, to spread wealth and take advantage of opportunity. Grace mentioned the textile trade: Manchester, along with Liverpool, Leeds, Leicester and a lot of the bigger cities in the north, was the seat of the traditional textile trade. Manchester’s complete and very complicated industrial legacy is built on the slave trade and the cotton trade. There’s an interesting dissection of that if you want to listen to my previous interview with Gemma Gratton, the Director of Manchester Fashion Week, where we engage with the city’s complicated legacy.
The upshot is that while Andy Burnham hasn’t directly talked about domestic textile manufacturing, he has talked about domestic manufacturing and reshoring across other industries — heavy machinery and so on — so I don’t think textile manufacturing is necessarily far behind. The interesting part for me is that if you read this year’s AI report, which is due out very soon, there’s a tech company in there among our top-flight sponsors who are from Manchester. They’re a tech start-up doing some fascinating work in 3D and AI, and they’re from Manchester.
I think what our UK and international listeners will see a lot more of in the months and years to come is this repositioning of where brands live, where technology sits, and where manufacturing happens. It’s a very interesting time for the UK, and a very interesting time for me as someone who’s lived in Manchester for most of my life. I think it does potentially have implications not just for fashion, and not just for where fashion manufacturing happens, but for where fashion technology gets made as well.
Anti-surveillance fashion — dressing against the cameras
Grace Robinson: Our next story has some weird parallels to the ones we’ve just spoken about, because no matter who’s in power, we still live in one of the most surveilled countries in the world.
With the rise of AI, I’m seeing a lot of people get more and more concerned about data protection, and I also saw a really timely article in Vogue this week about anti-surveillance garments, which is really interesting. I also think this is tied to the conversation we had last week about AI glasses. So I wanted to get your take on all of this.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. One of the UK’s best exports — mass surveillance, along with colonialism. We’ve got a good track record. So, we’re not the most surveilled state in the world; you and I had to look this up in advance of recording, and we’re something like the fifth. We’re behind China and behind the US. But we are still emblematic of a wider push towards ubiquitous recording whenever you leave the house.
When you and I talked about this before the show, you’re younger than me — as is well documented across this series — and I think you see it as less of a problem than I do. Part of me wonders if that’s because you’ve grown up with this being the background noise: the status quo is that whenever you leave your house, you’re recorded. That’s going to get kicked into a higher gear if AI-enabled, or at the very least camera-integrated, glasses take off as a category. It’s not clear at this point that that’s necessarily going to happen, but it seems like it’s what big technology is pushing towards.
If you pair that with Clearview AI — the company that does mass facial recognition for the police in the UK and abroad — you have a big apparatus for constantly recording people. And you’re going to see some return to that early-days-of-Google-Glass, “glasshole” thing, where people don’t like being recorded all the time wherever they are.
I think fashion does have a play here. That Vogue article you mentioned is really interesting, because you can integrate surveillance-blocking into things you’d wear anyway. I remember we did a piece on it years and years ago — I believe it was a hoodie you pulled up, which also had a zip-up face covering with what looked like urban camouflage or a QR code on it, designed to obfuscate facial detection. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. It can literally be a case of hiding your face, or having reflective garments that block infrared sensors.
I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this. The more cameras you put out there — on people’s faces and everywhere else — the more people start to translate this animus against AI in general into an animus against AI knowing where they are at all times, and against plugging AI into the surveillance apparatus we already have. The more of that, the more you’ll see people take action against it.
When I was younger, I was probably more of a privacy advocate. As I’ve got older, I’ve become more of an “I give up, and I’m just going to have to use Chrome, because it’s a requirement to participate in the world” person. I think you might see older people like me sliding into that, and younger people being a bit more activist. I don’t know — it’s a complicated space. But I do think there’s something for fashion to do here. We talked last week about integrating heat tech into garments; I think starting to integrate this kind of identity-protection tech into garments is going to become a big thing as well.
Textile-to-textile recycling — promise versus scale
Grace Robinson: The next story is a bit of a change of pace. I read a piece from Sourcing Journal about Jeanologia. The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel has partnered with Jeanologia, who are from Spain, and Looptworks, a US textile-to-textile recycling company, and they’ve created a new circular ecosystem they’re calling the Green Machine — essentially a way to separate blended fabrics that have cotton and polyester in them. To me, this feels like a really big leap forward for sustainable and circular fashion. So I wanted to get your take on it.
Ben Hanson: Yeah, I’m going to try to strike a balance here between raining on people’s parade and not. I’ll do the raining bit first. Upstream innovation does not have a great history of successful commercialisation, shall we say. I’ve done two podcast episodes on this in the recent past. One is already out, with Stephen Bates, the CEO of RHEON LABS, which is an energy-control technology company, talking about how difficult innovation in materials, process and production can be. And I have another one that I’m recording early next week with someone else, on the very same thing. There’s a difference between proving something out at the research, pilot and early stage, and actually making it work at commercial scale.
Everyone’s familiar with Renewcell and the other big stories about recycling innovations that did not take off — that didn’t make the leap from “this is a nice idea and we support it as a brand” to “we are willing to invest significant amounts in this and make it a bigger part of how we work.” Some of that comes down to where you put it. If you’re trying to do pre-consumer recycling, then this machinery and this ecosystem needs to exist in the supply chain, close to where that pre-consumer waste is generated in factories, as offcuts of the cutting process. If it’s post-consumer — a case of you and me going into a store and returning or donating blended polyester-cotton garments and having them mechanically separated into their constituent fibres — then that machinery needs to exist somewhere roughly close to where we live. If it’s a case of shipping it around to the other side of the world, a lot of the value and the incentive of doing it erodes.
All of that being said, I’ll stop raining on the parade, because it is very true that mono-materials — like pure cotton — are much easier to recycle than blends. And it’s also true that the fashion industry and consumers have a bit of an obsession with putting polyester, or oil-derived synthetics, into garments, because people like things with a bit of stretch. That means a lot of what we wear is not eminently recyclable. So if you’re able to take something like this and do what I believe is — I’m not sure whether it’s mechanical or chemical separation; I’ll refresh my understanding and come back to it in a future week — if we’re able to do this, it potentially is a big leap in the right direction. But it needs a lot of industry buy-in, the same way these things always do.
So I think people are right to be enthusiastic, and the evidence is also there to give people cause to be sceptical about how it plays out. Fingers crossed — time will tell.
Advertising provenance — from ‘recycled’ claims to AI labels
Grace Robinson: Finally, the labelling of recycled materials has also been in the headlines this week. A few brands — Adidas, Calvin Klein and Uniqlo — have had their ads investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority, the ASA, which determined that their use of the word “recycled” would lead consumers to believe their whole collections were made entirely from recycled materials, which they actually weren’t.
At the same time, we’re also seeing more regulation roll out around labelling AI-generated imagery. So it’s a very different space, but it does feel like part of the same challenge: companies need to be able to back up the provenance of the things they put out into the world, including through their advertising. So do you think these are short-term blips, or is something bigger going on here?
Ben Hanson: So I think the recycled one is part of the broader anti-greenwashing side of things. I don’t think it’s especially novel, but I think it’s the first time the ASA has directly gone after the definition of what constitutes “recycled”. This seems like an easy thing to fix. I’m not surprised it would be pulled up if these companies were saying a product is recycled — it depends very much on the framing of the ads. What you have to do is say this product is made up of a majority of recycled materials, or a minority of recycled materials. In the case of footwear, which I know is the subject of one of these, you could say the upper is made of recycled material and the rest of it isn’t — the rest is traditional injection-moulded plastics, adhesives and everything else. So I don’t think that’s a huge one to fix, or to fixate on.
You’re right that it’s emblematic of the fact that what you put out and what you say as a brand is something you have to be able to substantiate. This is what the ASA said in their response: they asked these companies to provide evidence of the amount of recycled materials, and the companies were generally not able to give that to a satisfactory level. It requires more granularity. That’s always been true for declaring the sustainability profile of a garment. It’s very true for the digital product passport, for instance: you’re able to put basically whatever you want in the DPP; whether you can stand by it is a different matter. And standing by something like “recycled”, or “regenerative cotton”, or “waterless dyeing” if we’re talking about denim, is something you have to be able to walk back to your suppliers. You have to be able to say: this happened at this stage, this happened here, and I have the data to prove it.
The AI-labelling one is the same thing, because if you’re going to put an image out in an ad that has a generative component or was completely generated, you need, as a brand, to have accountability for that in the here and now, even if the regulation isn’t clear. It’s not sufficient for any purpose at this point to just be generating images using AI, editing images, and not having an audit trail to say, “this is what we generated; this was physical photography that we augmented.” You should be able to look back at your workspace and see the node, and the node that follows, and the node that follows that, so that you actually have the data governance and the structure to disclose this stuff.
The AI-labelling side is a little more complicated, because the New York legislation people are talking about a lot at the moment concerns so-called “synthetic performers”, and that’s specific to New York State. That’s very explicit in its wording: it would one hundred per cent cover a fashion brand using a generated, human-looking model to model their clothes — that would be a synthetic performer. There’s no ambiguity in the wording, and no way of getting around the fact that that’s something you then have to label.
The EU one, which is coming into force in August, I believe, is a little more complicated. They’re providing a list of labels for people to use — little icons you put on things — but the wording is ambiguous and has some wiggle room. You cannot put fully AI-generated text on a product detail page without a disclosure label, unless that text is reviewed by a person who is then accountable. So that again feels like an easy fix: you can designate your marketing team or your e-commerce team with responsibility to do that, and you no longer have to label the text as AI-generated. The image part uses the “deepfake” language a lot.
Now, “deepfake” means something different to me — it means the more traditional technique of taking an actor portraying somebody, having them do an impersonation, and then using a machine-learning model trained on the actual person from their previous films to have them stand in. That’s what it means to me. It means something different to other people, but the way it’s written does not explicitly, at least the way I read it, require brands using human-looking generated models to disclose that fact, as far as I can tell.
Don’t use me as a legal justification for this, and I don’t run a brand — but if you look at the specific wording of the EU Act when it comes to labelling images, I feel that wholly generated AI models are actually permissible the way it’s written. Perhaps I’m wrong, and people should read this upcoming AI Report, because there’s a lot about this in there. And I’d like to bring somebody onto my interview show to talk about this very soon as well.