This article was originally published in The Interline’s AI Report 2025. To read other opinion pieces, exclusive editorials, and detailed profiles and interviews with key vendors, download the full AI Report 2025 completely free of charge and ungated.
Key Takeaways:
- AI is playing a growing role in brand communications, particularly in content generation and messaging workflows. As more creative tasks are handed to automated systems, some are beginning to reflect on what this means for voice, authorship, and the distinctiveness that gives a brand its identity.
- While AI can produce high volumes of brand-aligned content with speed and consistency, there are limits to what it can own or express. Some of the most resonant moments in fashion branding still come from influencer-founders whose personal voices shape the brand directly, often leading the narrative in ways that automated systems can’t replicate.
- The creative opportunity lies not in rejecting AI, but in using it with clear intent. When guided by editorial judgement and perspective, these tools can support experimentation and speed without displacing identity. The challenge is knowing where automation helps, and where human authorship remains essential.
AI is everywhere in fashion right now – I know, hardly a ground breaking statement – but the most significant turn isn’t in design or distribution. It’s in the voice. The story. Behind every “message from the brand” is a growing suspicion: did a human create this touchpoint, or a tool pretending to sound like one?
Forget AI influencers and forecasting engines. This is more intimate, and potentially more problematic. Across industries, it’s a quiet rewiring of how brands talk and at what speed and volume – raising the question of when voice becomes noise. This is not because AI is incapable, far from it, it’s more broadly capable, with greater overhang, than many people want to admit – but because too many brands, both in fashion and outside it, are letting AI do the talking, confusion could start to reign when it comes to understanding what’s actually being said.
Here’s the question no one seems to want to ask out loud: If every brand has the same AI tools and models, what makes an individual company’s message worth listening to?
We’re already right in the middle of the new normal of automated creativity. AI is no longer sitting in the wings: it’s writing headlines, crafting CTA’s, and creating visuals. The prompt is the new pitch. Midjourney instead of moodboards. ChatGPT in place of a copy deck. In a very compressed window of time, AI has become an essential part of the communications toolkit.
Etro’s 2024 campaign, developed in part with prompt designer Silvia Badalotti, marked an early case study in how these tools can be used deliberately, and in a way that draws attention to their artificiality. It’s extremely important to stress, these high fashion, style driven campaign images did not happen by accident. This was an intentional embrace of a new tool, with the aim of targeting “infinite possibilities”. The end results look quaint now, technically-speaking, but artistically there’s still something there that provokes, challenges, and asks how brand campaigns and technology should intersect.
That principle – laying down creative intent before choosing a tool – is going to remain essential for understanding how fashion should be approaching AI authorship of creative content. It sounds simple enough, but that clear-cut definition could become worryingly fluid as teams lean more and more into automated creativity. The toolset isn’t the issue when we look at a near-term horizon where AI is the first step in the content pipeline – it’s the potential impact this could have on critical creative direction, and the possibility of so-called “voice drift,” where even technically correct and superficially on-brand content starts to trend towards sameness and a vacancy of meaning. Think about it like this: AI systems post-trained on past communications can reliably reproduce a brand’s tone, often with 90% fidelity. But reliability isn’t the same as resonance, and replication is not synonymous with a consistent exercise of taste over time. Content, approached this way, runs the risk of becoming a linguistic photocopy, each iteration slightly less distinct than the last, and because the metrics often remain steady, no one raises the alarm. And this applies not just to written copy, but to visual content, stylistic elements, and other pieces of the puzzle that AI can potentially take over.
In this context, a new kind of creative role is emerging. Not traditional copywriters or designers, but AI-wranglers, prompt engineers, and brand technologists. Their job isn’t to originate every word or image, but to manage systems that do, albeit carefully, selectively, and with intent. AI gives you quantity with the simplest of ease, Humans, however, give you judgement and taste, often earned from years of experience. This is not lesser work. It is the editorial and creative direction backbone of future facing brand teams. Selecting, shaping, and refining output into something with integrity. The creative task moves from authorship to discernment, knowing what to keep and what to discard, and that discernment is most powerful when it has a name, a face, a human origin.
Despite the rapid automation of brand storytelling, some of the most resonant brands in fashion and beauty right now are the ones with a person behind the curtain. The influencer founder has a very public face, and with it a voice you can trace down to their latest social media post.
Think of Fenty Beauty, the Rihanna founded beauty company that specialises in inclusive makeup shades. It doesn’t just sound like Rihanna, it very much is Rihanna. From tone to casting to campaign language, the brand is steeped in her world view: confident, inclusive, but crucially “unbothered” and real. One of the most iconic Fenty moments wasn’t even a campaign at all – it was a comment. In 2017, when Make Up For Ever tried to ‘throw shade’ at Fenty’s then-just-launched 40-shade foundation line by posting “40 shades is nothing new to us,” Rihanna didn’t wait for a PR team to craft a response. She wrote three words: “lol. Still ashy.”
That comment wasn’t just viral, it was authentic branding. It said everything about Fenty’s tone of voice: sharp, real, culturally fluent, and unwilling to let old-guard beauty companies, often with manufactured faux edgy voices of their own, rewrite the narrative. That wasn’t a post approved by a marketing team, or that might in today’s operations be threaded through AI. It was the founder stepping in, in her own voice, in real time, and the message landed because it was hers.
The same principle applies to Skims. Kim Kardashian doesn’t just model the shapewear, she also models the brand’s presence. The visual minimalism, the hyper focus on fit and form – these aren’t just aesthetic decisions, they’re extensions of her. But the clearest example of authorship didn’t come from the Skims handle, it came from her personal account. When the brand launched its maternity shapewear line and was met with criticism for promoting unrealistic body standards, it wasn’t a corporate statement or campaign that clarified the brand’s position. It was Kardashian herself. She posted directly to her stories and X (then Twitter), explaining that the product was made for comfort and support, based on real requests from pregnant women, including herself. It was unflirted, reactive, grounded in lived experience, and all the more effective because of it.
For brands like Fenty or Skims, the founder’s voice often leads, not follows, the brand. The official account is often left to play catch-up. The real voice – the one that sets the tone, defines the stance, creates the moment – comes first through the founder’s personal channel. That’s how close the authorship is, and it works not because the founder has followers (though it helps), but because they have perspective. Their voice isn’t shaped to fit the brand, the brand is shaped around their voice. Like Rihanna, Kardashian didn’t delegate the defence of her brand to an agency or templated statement. She spoke, and the message stuck because it was hers. That’s the point: when Rihanna and Kim Kardashian speak through their personal accounts, what they’re really doing is collapsing the gap between brand and human. They’re not hiding behind corporate language. They are the brand voice. And that’s exactly what’s at risk. Because in a world where AI tools can now automate tone, generate copy, even simulate style with 90% accuracy, it’s that remaining 10%, the part that feels lived in, and personally claimed, that’s everything. It’s where the difference lives. AI tools can generate on-brand messages, but they can’t generate ownership. They can’t choose to speak for a company in pivotal moments, only a person can.
And yet, AI remains the most powerful creative tool of a generation, and on that point, it’s important to separate critique from rejection. AI, used well, is not the death of creativity. It’s a lever for creative expansion. Used thoughtfully, AI becomes a tool of amplification, not replacement. It allows brands to test more ideas, reach more audiences, and refine their message faster than before. The key, as always, is not the technology itself, but the intention behind its use. When paired with strong editorial judgement and a clear point of view, AI has the potential to enhance, rather than dilute a brand’s narrative identity.
Let’s be honest about what’s at stake. This isn’t just a story about tools, or automation, or efficiency. This is about the erosion of expressive identity in brand communication, and the cultural cost of letting machines optimise what used to be authored. AI at its best expands creative potential. It makes things faster, but it doesn’t make them truer. The real value of a brand has never been how quickly it can ship content. It’s in what it chooses to say. How it chooses to say it, and what it’s willing to protect when speed and sameness start to look like success.
Ultimately, we all need to remember what branding is: the sum total of choices that make a company recognisable, memorable, and, at its best, felt.
When those choices are almost fully outsourced, swallowed by efficiency, the brand ceases to be a voice and instead becomes an echo. The way forward isn’t to reject AI, neither is it to worship it. It’s to define its limits. Use it to assist, not to replace. To test, not template. Because when tools are universal, the difference will always come down to taste. Not just aesthetic taste, but narrative discipline. Clarity of voice. Confidence in perspective.
