Risk, Reward, And Cultural Pushback on AI In Fashion – And A New Play For the Secondary Market
This week on The Edit: five fresh headline stories from across fashion and technology receive the quickfire analysis treatment.
What If The Models Go Away?
Fashion has spent the first half of this year redesigning different go-to-market stages, with a common foundation of closed-source, cloud-hosted, almost universally American models. Now, non-US brands are being reminded that they’ve potentially built on a single point of failure.
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.
AI VTO, Automation, Lawsuits, Personalisation, And Live Shopping
The first edition of The Edit, a new weekly show where Social Editor Grace interviews Editor-in-Chief Ben about five headline stories from across fashion and technology in less than 25 minutes.
The Price Of Personalisation
Despite World Cup fever bringing marketing teams and consumers together around a united aesthetic front, fashion continues to try and individualise the shopping experience through data capture and use - creating new risk exposure surfaces. But heavy investments made in AI and printing hardware are potentially unlocking a very different avenue for personalisation.
Luxury Is Looking For A Fulfilment Advantage
Luxury fashion and beauty brands are redesigning their supply chains, not just digitising them.
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.
A Precarious Moment For Platforms Built On Scraping Product Data
From the big tech giants to the buzziest start-ups, companies are architecting new AI-assisted or agentic discovery and transaction flows that rely on the ubiquity and open availability of SKU-level data, while the gatekeepers of that data are finding more incentives to lock it away.
Five Years, Five Hundred Fabrics – Hard-Learned Truths About Material Digitisation
One company committed to building out a free-to-use library of high-fidelity digital fabrics, in industry-standard formats. In the process, it learned a lot about the state of the digital product creation ecosystem.
Fashion’s Next Frontier: Gen Z Craves ‘Real Life’ Engagement
Surrounded by synthetic content, key fashion demographics are putting a high premium on the real world. The data that tells brands how, and where, to meet them is becoming one of fashion’s hottest commodities.
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?
Why Events Are Thriving in the AI Attention Economy
AI-driven content saturation is making live experiences one of the most valuable tools in a brand's marketing arsenal.
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?
So, Are We Just Done With The Internet Now?
The eventual outcome of inserting AI between people and content - commercially-oriented or otherwise - is a passive digital desert, and fashion should fear that outcome just as much as any other content creator.