The Legal Frontiers Of AI In Fashion
Every industry is wrestling with the same big-ticket AI questions around fair use, labelling, and disclosure. But fashion has a set of AI legal quandaries all of its own.
Arm’s Length AI
An article for humans and a live, working toolkit for agents, to help both explore fashion's hesitant relationship with AI together, and to test themselves against it.
What Business Spend Data Really Says About AI Adoption
Fifty-five per cent of American businesses now pay for AI. But what are companies actually buying, and who are they buying it from?
Why Fashion Still Over-Develops
Despite decades’ worth of technology adoption and transformation initiatives, brands, on average, develop far more materials and style than they, or the market, actually need. What needs to change?
The Case For Creating A New, Digital-Native Luxury Group
Groups and conglomerates have dominated luxury for decades, but recent attempts to forge new ones have floundered. A new Irish group, steeped in the country’s heritage, is betting on technology making the difference.
Can 3D Weaving Make Domestic Production Viable?
Arne Arens made the unusual leap from being a brand executive to leading a technology company in fashion’s most unforgiving segment: manufacturing innovation. From creating net-new jobs to translating digital product creation outputs into seamless garments, his big bet is on this transformation taking root.
Finding The Feeling In AI Campaigns
Zalando has pushed further than perhaps any other company in embedding generative AI into its content creation - from product page materials to full-blown creative campaigns - and in talking openly about it. But if cost-saving isn’t the primary objective, what is?
The High Bar For Disrupting Knitting
Outside of software itself, knitting is probably the closest thing fashion has to coding: a verifiable, binary discipline defined by scarce talent, and specialised software and hardware. Upending it might be the industry’s high bar for new technology - but one company is trying anyway.
The Forking Path From Invention To Industrialisation
Upstream innovation, in materials, processing, and production, has had a chequered few years. Promising pilots routinely fail to take flight or achieve commercial scale. What does success on the journey from lab to big-label deployment actually look like?
The Future Of Fashion’s Thirst For Water
Fashion devotes a lot of time to securing its inputs, but the importance of water to the industry’s supply chain goes under-discussed, and water is not quantified and assessed the way carbon is. But as water justice becomes a more acute business continuity risk, the demand to reckon with fashion’s thirst is growing.
Podcast: Proving Out The Pre-Loved Luxury Model
The case is strong for someone to own the secondary market, but whether that winds up being first or third-party ownership will depend as much on platforms and standards as it does on business models and incentives.
Podcast: Is Innovation Shaping Storytelling Or Vice Versa?
Fashion and beauty are surrounded by digital surfaces and physical spaces, and technology has fast become a fixture of how the higher echelons of both industries tell stories and create experiences. But what does the work really look like? And which force - tech or narrative - is in the driving seat?
Podcast: Earning The Right To Replace Spreadsheets
Fashion professionals, particularly in planning-related disciplines, are tasked with making a lot of decisions. The environment those choices live in is still stubbornly Excel, so what does it take to design software to replace spreadsheets - especially when AI is added to the mix?
Podcast: The Image Trade Is Booming. Can The Trust Economy Keep Up?
The unit economics of replacing product photography with either wholly-generated or AI-edited images are, from a rational perspective, pretty clear-cut. But with consumer animus against AI content peaking, there’s more to generative images than just the bottom line.