The Edit is our weekly show, where Social Editor Grace Robinson quizzes editor-in-chief Ben Hanson on some of the most significant fashion and technology stories from the past seven days.
This week, Grace Robinson and Ben Hanson discuss Klarna’s repair partnership with Save Your Wardrobe, Adobe’s holiday shopping forecasts for AI and buy now, pay later, a16z’s findings on consumer and business AI adoption, L’Oréal’s market value and beauty’s relationship with technology, and Tesco’s in-store virtual try-on trial.
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Grace Robinson: So 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 around 25 minutes to give you our analysis on the stories that we think really matter.
Ben Hanson: Hey, Grace. Good to see you again. I am marginally better rested than I was this time last week, but only by an hour or two. I think I’ve had two and a half hours’ sleep last night as opposed to one hour’s sleep last week. But I am here. I am raring to go. There’s a bunch of very different things to talk about this week. It’s not all about AI for a change. So let’s get into it. Hit me.
Can buy now, pay later help clothes last longer?
Grace Robinson: I know in previous weeks of The Edit, you’ve spoken about some of the issues that come along with buy now, pay later services like Klarna. This week, Klarna was in the headlines again, but for a slightly more positive reason, I think, so I’m intrigued to get your thoughts on it.
In collaboration with Save Your Wardrobe, Klarna has introduced a new feature that allows shoppers to assess the different repair options that are available for that piece. Now shoppers can use Klarna, look at all of their order history and search for a specific repair they want. This could be alterations, cleaning or traditional mending. Then Klarna, with Save Your Wardrobe’s infrastructure, will give all of the services that are available.
Klarna says this is a really important service because it’s not that shoppers don’t want to repair their clothes or don’t know that they’re able to do it. It’s more that they don’t have that knowledge of what brands actually offer this service. Since it is about buy now, pay later in a way, I wanted to get your take on this and what you make of this story.
Ben Hanson: Of course. I’m going to try not to be cynical. I’ll get a bit cynical at the end of the answer, I think, maybe as we go with this.
I know the team at Save Your Wardrobe. I’ve previously interviewed Hasna on stage and off, I believe. The work that Save Your Wardrobe does is really interesting because they started life as a more consumer-facing application and then built out their B2B infrastructure over time.
This report, or this partnership announcement at the very least, hints at the fact that people don’t know which brands offer repair services. Behind that is the issue that the majority of brands don’t have their own repair services. What they do is either offer white-label repair services, or partner with a company like Save Your Wardrobe, which acts as a kind of intermediary layer between the brand and local repair companies, tailors and so on: people who are able to fix up garments so that the customer gets an end-to-end service that extends the value and the lifespan of their clothes. The brand or retailer doesn’t have to necessarily invest in setting up all of that infrastructure and that business unit themselves.
Not everybody is going to be a Patagonia. It’s the example that always comes to mind, where you will have a seamstress in store and you will take back clothes. You’ll take back a Patagonia outdoor jacket for its entire life and repair it even if it’s 20 years old. There are a lot of companies that don’t want to do that because they don’t keep things in their product mix that long. They don’t keep materials and things in circulation that long, and they don’t want to invest in that kind of setup.
So from a pure repairability point of view, great. Definitely a net positive. From the point of view of having this exist tied to somebody’s buy now, pay later profile, again, fine. This isn’t something that Visa or Mastercard or any other payment processor is going to do. If you buy things from multiple retailers and multiple brands, like most people do, it would be quite hard for you to try and keep on top of which things you can get repaired where.
If you buy things through Klarna, what you get is not only the deferred payment credit, but the ability to centralise all of this and say, okay, I bought things from a bunch of different places. I would like to get five of the 10 of them repaired. The other five, I’m going to let languish or throw away. So again, a net positive there.
The thing that I zeroed in on with my cynic’s eye a little bit was, as part of the announcement, they said that something like three in five UK consumers spend less than £50 — my maths is bad, but something in the region of 70 US dollars — on individual clothing items intended for long-term wear. Now that to me seems weird. I understand it from an economic and a behavioural point of view. People don’t have a huge amount of discretionary income to spend on fashion. Something costing £50 is not designed to last.
With my cynic’s hat on, I would say, are we feeding into a kind of, not obsolescence cycle, but a cycle where people buy things with deferred payment credit, they keep those things for a long time, so they’re happier to keep paying them off for a longer time because they feel like they keep value for a longer time? They also feed into a repair cycle for brands and retailers that has a finite endpoint on it. There’s only so many times you can repair something that was not designed for quality to begin with.
I don’t think I have a solution for that, and I really don’t want it to seem like I’m just poking holes in the whole thing, but that would be the slight negative I would see here. I’m not going to bring in Terry Pratchett into this podcast very often, but there is a famous, I forget what it’s called, the boots theory of luxury versus why poverty persists. It goes that if you only have the money to buy cheap boots, you end up spending more on them over time because the cheap ones break, and then you have to replace them. But you don’t have the upfront money that somebody rich would have to spend on better-quality boots that would last for 10 years.
You can read this one of two ways. You can read this as helping to avoid that cycle, or you can read this as helping to kind of codify that cycle a little bit. But repair, very noble goal. Love the folks at Save Your Wardrobe.
How much is AI changing holiday shopping?
Grace Robinson: The next story, we’re talking about buy now, pay later again, but in a slightly different context. We’re moving to that time of the year where Cyber Monday is coming about, and also Black Friday. A new report from Adobe Analytics is predicting that online sales are set to hit $275 billion this holiday season.
Really interestingly, Adobe put this down to AI traffic and also buy now, pay later, which is really contributing to this. They said that AI traffic to US retail sites is set to rise 130% year over year, and this is because more consumers are adopting AI shopping, as we know. They also said that buy now, pay later is expected to drive $21 billion worth of sales, and this is up 6.6% year over year. So this really shows the impact of impulse shopping and how it’s driving the adoption of these kinds of payment options. Again, I know you have a lot of thoughts about buy now, pay later. What do you make of this story as well?
Ben Hanson: I have one thought about buy now, pay later. It’s just a very consistent one, week over week. I’ll get into what I think about it in a minute.
I would say for anyone who wants to unpick some of the buy now, pay later deferred payment credit stuff, I did an interview with Alex Forsyth-Thompson, who’s the CEO of Float, which is a card-linked instalment deferred payment credit provider, and I grilled him a whole bunch about the whole deferred payment space. If you’re interested in some deeper stuff on how I feel about that and whether I’m right or wrong, I would encourage people to listen to that episode.
The thing I wanted to ask you with this, as somebody who — I’m throwing some barbs your way here — buys a lot of clothes, do you use buy now, pay later services at any point in that journey?
Grace Robinson: I’ve definitely been very tempted to use them in the past when I’ve been online shopping, but I have always resisted it. A lot of that is because I actually found setting up the payment method and doing the whole process became quite complicated, so that put me off. But a lot of my friends definitely do. So it is definitely a widely adopted behaviour. I just personally don’t do it.
Ben Hanson: Neither have I. But again, there’s some measure of privilege on both of our parts where we’re like, well, we don’t need to. We can afford to buy the things that we’re after without doing it. Whether that’s comfortable or not is personal.
Those statistics do show that it sounds like a lot. It sounds like buy now, pay later is driving $21 billion in sales, or expected to this holiday season, up 6% year over year. If you take that $275 billion as the holiday target, it actually only really amounts to seven and a half per cent or something of overall holiday sales volume.
My one primary objection to buy now, pay later is that I’m concerned that fashion uses it as a growth crutch and gets people to buy things they can’t afford, and that’s the only way to meet metrics. This is evidence against that feeling. If 93% of holiday shopping is done without deferred payment credit, then that would seem like a net positive for me.
Now the other thing I wanted to ask you about was the AI side of things. We’ve talked a bunch about AI influencing shopping online and off. We talked about it in physical stores last week. How far have you gone down the road of helping AI? Because I know you mentioned previously you’re kind of using it to help with some outfit building and things along those lines. As we go into the holidays and you’re shopping for more than just yourself, you’re shopping for other people, do you foresee yourself talking to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and using it as more of an aid to shopping? Because I’m not there yet, but I do use AI a lot more than I used to.
Grace Robinson: I think a couple of weeks ago I would have said definitely not, but I also would have said I would never have used AI for any kind of fashion recommendation, which I now have done to find different pieces. So I’m definitely not going to say that I wouldn’t use it.
I could see it being useful shopping for parents, or knowing that someone wants something within a category that I don’t have a lot of expertise on. So I’m definitely not saying I wouldn’t use it as we move closer to the holiday season.
Ben Hanson: Yeah, I think I fall into this. Sometimes when you watch AI company demos and things, you’re like, who the hell are these people? Everybody seems so out of touch. Everybody seems so busy. Are these real lives that people have, that they’re required to do these things? I’m starting to see more of myself in it right now.
I can imagine rocking up at a store in my car on the way back from dropping the kids at school, or on the way to pick the kids up at school, and being like, I know that I’ve got a birthday list for my eldest in my Apple Notes. I could manually pull it up, or I could just have a quick voice conversation with ChatGPT as I pull into the car park and be like, what did she have on her list again? What are the things that I’m going in here to look for?
It would be a natural next turn to go, is this the cheapest place to get those? Could I get these on Amazon? Some of that showrooming stuff that we talked about. Again, I’m aware that makes me seem out of touch and a bit privileged from that point of view, but I also find myself using it for stuff that I didn’t think I would use it for in my personal life increasingly these days.
Although, as we get into our next story, which I’ll hand back to you for, I think there’s some statistics that suggest that while this kind of explosion of AI influencing shopping seems very large, there’s a bit more nuance to it than that. So let’s talk about the next thing, because the next thing is one that I found. Quiz me on that.
Who is paying for AI and measuring its value?
Grace Robinson: Next, we’re going to be talking about a new report from Andreessen Horowitz. They put out their State of Markets report and they also did a Substack post about it. One of the things that stood out to me was the argument that even though tech is taking over the stock market, adoption is actually still quite early and small.
They point out that while around 30% of S&P 500 companies do report some kind of quantifiable impact from AI, only around 2% are actually tracking a specific metric. Consumer paid adoption is still very low.
The broader argument is that we’re moving from a bits world, so software and SaaS, into more of an atoms world, where AI is driving demand for physical infrastructure like GPUs, data centres, chips and eventually robotics as well. At the same time, the piece also argues that traditional software isn’t necessarily dead, but it’s more that companies now have to prove that AI is creating real, measurable value.
I know you just touched on this, but I’m really interested to hear your perspective about what this specifically means for fashion, and where you think fashion sits on this AI adoption curve.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. There’s two places that it sits on the adoption curve, right? One is for the businesses, and one is for the consumer. It was the consumer one I was just hinting at in that previous question that we had.
If we think about the expected growth in AI influencing shopping, it seems on the face of it like everybody is using AI, right? It seems like everybody has their own personal agentic shopper, AI assistant, and that’s what’s driving all of this. But the statistic you just mentioned, that a very small number of people, I think about 2% of US households, are actually paying for an AI service, complicates that in two ways.
One is that presumably means this huge subset of people — OpenAI claim 1.2 billion monthly active users, something along those lines — presumably that means 98% of the people using it are using the free tier. Now I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I’m not saying everybody has to pay for AI. I wish our token budgets and stuff weren’t as high as they are sometimes.
But using the free version adds two complicating layers to this. One is if you’re using the free version to do shopping on your behalf, it uses older, cheaper models. It restricts your usage quite a lot. You’re essentially having a second-rate, second-tier kind of stylist assistant shopping experience, right? So there’s a gap emerging between people who can afford to pay to do the sort of showrooming and real cross-shopping and everything else that you get with AI, and people who are stuck with the second-class version of it.
Then you have, well, okay, what’s the incentive to continue to offer the second-class version from OpenAI’s point of view? It’s ads. There’s been a lot of progress in the way that ads are working their way into ChatGPT conversations specifically. There’s more frameworks and stuff in place now there. There’s more in the way of individualised conversations with ads. We also saw very recently YouTube adding conversational agents to YouTube ads, so you can go and talk to an advert.
What product is getting recommended to you there? Who is the winner? Who is the beneficiary in that kind of value exchange? Is it the advertiser? Is it the retailer that pays to put products in front of you? Is it the consumer? Do you end up with a better product? Do you end up with a cheaper product? Do you end up with a better deal?
To me, that’s a very interesting point of tension here. We talk a lot, and big companies like Adobe and Stripe and Shopify talk a lot, about agentic commerce and everybody having their own agent with their own wallet. The precondition to that, to me right now, is that the economics don’t justify that being done for every free subscriber around the world, and there’s a whole lot of free subscribers around the world.
Then the other part of the adoption curve is the business one, as we talked about. This is just a bit of validation for the relatively narrow survey that we ran as part of the AI Report 2026. We only talked to about 100 brands and retailers. This is larger. But if you look at the S&P 500, so Standard & Poor’s 500, representative of the US stock market essentially, only a third or slightly less than a third of them say there’s a quantifiable impact of AI, and only 2% are really tracking those according to metrics.
Both of those are worse than what we found for fashion, so the wider picture is actually less encouraging than it is within fashion. We found that about a quarter of companies had a sort of rubric for scoring the return on investment in AI, and we found that actually most companies believed that there was some impact from AI. It happened to be concentrated in particular areas, but there weren’t many people who believed it wasn’t having an impact at all.
This is a weird one because a16z, Andreessen Horowitz, they have a vested interest in making it seem like tech is the solution to everything. They also have a vested interest in making it seem like there’s a big gap still to go, because that’s why people will continue to funnel money into AI companies and so on. But industry adoption is worse than I expected it to be, and consumer adoption is lower than I expected it to be.
Given the amount we talk about AI, given the amount other publications talk about AI, I think it’s important to bear some of these statistics in mind. We are still talking about a small, small subset of the population. Just because you might sit there, or I might sit there, in Claude Desktop or Codex all day or whatever, doesn’t mean that’s regular behaviour for regular shoppers.
What can beauty offer the tech-savvy consumer?
Grace Robinson: Next, we’re going to be moving into more of the luxury fashion sector. It’s no secret that luxury has had a tough couple of years. People are really realising the diminishing quality of luxury products. The prices of luxury products have really been hiked recently as well. Also, just generally, the economic state of the world has prevented even the wealthiest shoppers from buying luxury.
Recently, there has been a report shared by Reuters, and they said that LVMH has unsurprisingly lost its place among Europe’s top 10 largest companies. They also interestingly explained that the cosmetics group L’Oréal has actually become France’s most valued listed company, surpassing Louis Vuitton, which is an LVMH brand. So I wanted to get your take on why this has happened, and also what the connection to tech is here.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. I think there’s a connection to tech here. Maybe I’m stretching my expertise a little bit, but I’ve had enough conversations with people like Hannah, who leads BoF Professional and BoF Insights for Business of Fashion, where we’ve talked about overall fashion industry growth, some of the challenges facing the luxury market and so on.
Perceived value is the whole luxury game. I hate to refer people to other podcasts again, but when I interviewed Ashley McDonnell, who is the CEO of VYKO Group, which is Ireland’s first, newest luxury group, she and I get into what actually constitutes luxury and what that promise is. But you’re correct in that when people’s money is squeezed, when luxury conglomerates start to encounter these sorts of market challenges, product challenges and things, it is inevitable at some point that some of that perceived value rubs off and that people start to say, is this worth spending money on?
Luxury has always been France’s biggest export. It’s been France’s biggest export certainly for most of my lifetime, so this is quite an upheaval. I think it’s the first time in at least a decade where this has been the case, where it’s not LVMH or a luxury house that is France’s biggest company.
The reason I think there’s a tech slant to this is that I think beauty has much, much more to offer to the tech-savvy consumer than fashion does at the moment. I don’t mean that in an experiential way. I mean that at a pure product level.
Yes, beauty has more affordable categories, right? You can go buy some cosmetics. You can go buy some lipstick. You can go buy some fragrance. They have a lot of entry points to luxury beauty brands, high-end beauty brands, that don’t require you to spend a fortune. Luxury fashion does that to some extent with scarves and belts and that kind of thing, but certainly not the same way.
I think the bigger thing is that beauty can sell you devices and beauty can sell you tech-facing experiences in a way that fashion can’t. You can sell people devices to mix foundations at home, for instance. You can put really technologically advanced operations into clinics and retail settings that are close to the consumer. You can engage people with things like AI virtual try-on and AI-driven hyper-personalisation in beauty in a way that you can’t in fashion.
So I admit that I’m tilting things into the tech sphere because that’s what I know more than I know the full dynamics of luxury and beauty. But to me, it seems like the beauty industry has a way of engaging people who use technology every day and who are more open to buying device categories and buying different products than they would be in fashion. L’Oréal is at the forefront of a lot of that innovation. We’ve done a profile on their presence at VivaTech and things before.
I have a podcast episode interview coming out quite soon with the CEO of Haut.AI, which is all about hyper-personalisation and feedback loops for beauty. I would encourage people to come back and listen to that one because I think you can read it in context of this news.
Could virtual try-on find its place in stores?
Grace Robinson: The final story this week is the fact that Tesco is trialling virtual try-on. In the brand’s Sandhurst store, they’ve now introduced a new customer experience which allows any shopper to virtually try on 1,500 items from F&F, which is their in-store brand. Customers can do this by either taking a picture of themselves and visualising the garment on themselves, or they can use a virtual model and see the pieces in different sizes.
On top of this, it seems that Tesco is also expanding its other retail experiences. They now have changing rooms. They also have introduced other technology into their retail experience, and they’ve also just launched their online store as well for clothes. I wanted to get your take on this story. Why is it interesting, and do you think that this is a new era for virtual try-on for fashion?
Ben Hanson: Okay. This is an interesting one. It’s a very, very narrow story, this. You and I both agreed that when we picked it up, because it relates to one big retailer. Tesco, for anybody who is not familiar, is a big supermarket. I assume they do homewares. They certainly do a lot of food and groceries, and they’ve had their own fashion label for a while. It’s not been a big priority. They’re putting a renewed emphasis on it.
It’s one retailer, and it’s in one store in the UK. I don’t actually know where Sandhurst is. This is one of those UK stories where I’m like, I’m talking about this, and I don’t know where it is in the country.
The reason I think this is interesting is that virtual try-on in general has been through a really rocky road. We had the CEO of AIUTA — however you pronounce it — which is the company behind this. They wrote an opinion piece for us a couple of months ago, and she was also interviewed in our AI Report. They’re pretty candid, as we have been, about the fact that virtual try-on has been a lot of up and down, and that fashion’s never really found the right balance of technology, outcomes and user experience to make it compelling enough for people to continue to use. There’s been a lot of attempts at it. AI seems like it might be the moment where it starts to work for people.
I went to a runway show that was put on by Topshop with support from Google Cloud a few months ago. Reported on it, and Google had something like this there. They had a showcase which was: stand in front of a screen, stand in front of an installation, take a photo of yourself and try on some garments. Then have those garments sent to you either via email, or just look at them then and there and place orders if you want to.
Bringing this into stores, for me, is the interesting part because if we haven’t quite found the right mix of technology and behaviour online, do we find the right mix of technology and behaviour in store? My mind would go to, if you’re in store and you’re already open to the idea of going into a fitting room, this is probably a better place to do it than it is online, or at least to do it as well as you do it online.
I would probably use this, to be honest. I don’t go shopping a lot. If I did, I would happily give this a go because I’d be like, I don’t want to take 15 items into the changing rooms. I’m very happy to just try these on virtually with the understanding that the drape isn’t going to be accurate, the fit isn’t going to be exactly accurate, but I’m going to get some visibility into how this thing would look on me.
So, narrow story, but I think with some broader implications if this new turn in virtual try-on ends up getting embedded more into physical stores as much as it is into ecommerce.
My ending question to you for this week is, would you use it? I’m not saying you shop at F&F. I don’t shop at F&F. But if you went and found somewhere where there was a store you went into, and you’re like, there’s a wide selection here, I don’t feel like trying on 20 different things. I’m just going to do a quick AI simulation. Maybe that narrows it down to three things that you then try on. I don’t know. But I’m keen to see what you think about it.
Grace Robinson: It’s funny because I think if it was in a different store, if it was in any other kind of fashion shop that I enjoy shopping from, I probably wouldn’t. But the fact that it’s in a supermarket and it’s the F&F line, I would use it because it’s more about just knowing that it generally looks okay. It’s less of a purchase that I would need to mull over and think about a lot.
So I would use it in this setting, and I think I would use it in other multi-brand stores like a TK Maxx, like a discount store as well, where I don’t want to spend too much time there. But in a more traditional, more luxurious fashion shop, I wouldn’t use it, which is quite interesting.
Ben Hanson: Yeah. I think what you may end up with — and we’ve seen this done before — is store associates in higher-end companies doing this for you. Making it part of a clienteling experience if you go and shop in a premium or a luxury store and have them go, I’ve picked out these 10 things for you. You can try them on in person, or we can filter it in the first instance, and I can show you what those looks would look like on you with AI. Then you narrow it down to the three that you like, and I will put those in the fitting room for you, and then I’ll make some other recommendations via email or afterwards.
I can see it both ways. I can see it being a convenience thing in those convenient settings. I can also see it potentially being a good tool for premium stuff, but not self-serve, more as part of a clienteling experience.
All of this would require me to go shopping more than I do, so maybe that’s my task for the coming week: to actually go and buy some clothes in store, which is a rare, rare experience for me, but I know is not one for you.