Fashion's Future: Which Creative Directors Will Embrace AI?

In the months that followed the Spring/Summer 2026 season, we have seen a series of new hires in the communications, marketing and design departments of all major houses. Our new series ‘Fashion's Real Reset Starts Now’ looks at all these changes and how they will redefine the fashion industry in the years to come. It’s been almost eight years since Alessandro Michele unveiled his Fall/Winter 2018 collection for Gucci in Milan, a show named Paradoxical Creatures that imagined a pluriverse of “hybrid and shifting identities”, show notes read at the time. The collection was inspired by feminist writer Donna Haraway’s 1985 text A Cyborg Manifesto, which predicted a post-genre world where technology blurred the boundaries between humans, animals and machines, and encouraged engagement with the messy realities of this evolution. “We’re in a post-human era,” Michele said in a press conference following the show. “What can seem atypical, anomalous, flawed, to a normalizing eye, acquires a new legitimacy — a new breath.” It’s a concept that now seems more relevant than ever. In the age of mainstream AI, designers are faced with the choice of harnessing the technology for their work or intentionally flouting it in favor of untouched human creativity. After all, it’s the creative director’s unique ability to concoct a brand point of view that reflects society’s biggest preoccupations. The year 2025 was a seismic one of change for fashion, as we witnessed countless creative director changes against a turbulent economic and political backdrop and unprecedented advancements in the world of AI. Fashion commentators say this disruption will breed creativity. And with AI’s potential to change the world as we know it remaining a core part of the cultural conversation, consumers are watching how brands react with eagle eyes. “Given how significant the change is that we’re all going to be living through with AI, it’s inevitable these changes are going to be reflected in how brands tell their story. It’s naive to suggest otherwise,” says Matthew Drinkwater, head of the Fashion Innovation Agency at London College of Fashion. This gives rise to the foundational question: in the age of AI, how much does tech sit within the creative director’s remit? And who are the creative directors most likely to embrace AI? A digital fashion history A look at the digital fashion track records of certain creative directors helps to inform our guess. When Demna stepped into the creative director role at Balenciaga in 2015, he immediately began exploring cyber aesthetics, 3D printing and dystopian futurism, where technology and algorithms became a source of design inspiration as well as part of his design language through tech-forward creative campaigns. “This positioned Balenciaga as the first true ‘tech native’ luxury house,” says Leanne Elliott-Young, CEO and co-founder of the Institute of Digital Fashion (IoDF). Michele simultaneously joined Gucci in 2015, releasing a landmark fully digital creative campaign in 2018, Ignasi Monreal meets Gucci, which saw the brand combine the illustrator’s work with CGI in a digitally animated utopian fantasy that spanned billboards and social media, as well as the brand’s packaging and website. Michele consistently worked with non-traditional brand teams of creators like CGI illustrators, 3D artists and digital animators during his tenure. “Gucci became one of the first major luxury houses to put CGI art at the center of global advertising, signaling that the craft in this field could be recognized as true artistry,” Young says. Later came fashion’s brief flirtation with Web3 and the metaverse, from 2019 to 2023, a period that saw an explosion of collaborations between luxury brands and tech companies, blurring the parameters between physical and digital fashion. In 2019, Nicolas Ghesquière debuted a limited-edition Louis Vuitton prestige “skin” within online esports game League of Legends, in a creative exploration that stemmed from his own personal obsession with augmented reality, sci-fi and time travel. “It’s fascinating—the frontier where fantasy begins and reality ends,” the designer told Vogue at the time. “Where it’s especially interesting for us is how a character that was built in the game becomes an influence on the real world, and how people will want to dress in her looks.” In 2021, Balenciaga’s collaboration with video game Fortnite, led by Demna, functioned as a significant moment for high fashion entering gaming with luxury “skins”, too. In the same year, Gucci, under Michele, debuted a two-week virtual art collection within Roblox through its Gucci Garden metaverse retail flagship, a brand-building exercise geared toward younger Gen Z consumers. In 2022, Burberry launched Burberry: Freedom to Go Beyond, a collaboration with video game Minecraft that comprised an in-game branded experience, alongside a capsule collection of its most popular products, including its Heritage Trench Coat, in a creative experiment the brand said “embodies our affinity for the natural world and the limitless potential for adventure it holds”. Between 2022 and 2024, Prada released several “timecapsule” NFT collections via Ethereum blockchain, in what it called its “creative presence in Web3”. In 2023, after a decade at the helm of Loewe, Jonathan Anderson played on the idea of blurring the digital with the physical, while flipping the concept on its head, when he presented his SS23 Pixel collection. The capsule, spanning menswear and womenswear, featured a trompe l’oeil effect that made its clothing and Puzzle bag appear as if they were low-res digital items, IRL. Fashion’s metaverse and NFT experiments were short-lived, however, as hype dwindled. An often-cited example of the peak of the craze was Dolce & Gabbana’s The Doge Crown NFT, a jewel-encrusted crown that sold for over $1.2 million, as part of their landmark digital fashion collection in 2021. “This became the symbol of luxury’s early Web3 gold rush, signaling the end of the Web3 NFT bubble in fashion,” Young says. As metaverse hype waned, what followed has largely been a return to embracing craftsmanship. The undeniable explosion of generative AI, though, has reverted attention back to tech and how it intersects with the industry. Early clues There have been a handful of digital creative experiments in the last few months that offer an early indication of which houses could appear more tech-forward under their new creative directors. Unsurprisingly, it’s the same names cropping up. So far, the loudest creative exploration of AI has come from Michele’s latest home, Valentino, via the launch of a nine-part digital art series showcasing the Garavani DeVain bag he introduced as part of his pre-fall 2025 collection, posted to the brand’s social media. The house has been transparent about when the artists used AI to create their pieces, and described the vision behind the project as an “ongoing dialog between human creativity and digital experimentation, reaffirming the value of artistic collaboration as an authentic expression of contemporaneity.” The works in question were surreal and dared to lean into AI’s tendency toward visual entropy — the uncanny valley that has been labeled “slop.” They were divisive, having met with social media critique, as has been the case with every brand’s experiments with AI visuals in the past year. But more broadly, the Valentino campaign showed us how customers are expecting labels to adopt a stance on their use of AI that fits with their wider brand values. They also precipitated a discussion around whether embracing AI entropy — leaning into glitch as a creative act — could be fashion’s next visual language in 2026. Instagram content It’s a continuation of Michele’s track record in engaging with young digital artists, many of whom used AI for their commissions. But crucially, commentators say, Michele didn’t create it himself. “To me, it seemed like Valentino was smart about how they did it, they’re testing the waters with AI,” says fashion critic and journalist Louis Pisano. “By commissioning external artists through a distinct project, the blame couldn’t really come back to them if it turned out to be something people react negatively to. But if people react positively, it could be something they explore in the future.” Tech’s positioning within the ranks of fashion houses is now less clear than it used to be, when innovation and metaverse hires made headlines. Insiders say the “creative innovation” teams that spearheaded these metaverse experiments within luxury houses largely disappeared during the slowdown, as brands doubled down on creative projects that show more ROI promise. Now, tech-enabled creative projects are more likely to fall within the broader marketing team’s remit; but they’re still so central to the brand story that they’ll need sign-off from the creative lead. (Valentino declined to comment on its team structure nor Michele’s tech vision for the brand.) Micael Barilaro spent almost 15 years heading up Gucci’s creative innovation team until August 2024, when he says the brand restructured. (Gucci declined to comment on its new team structure nor Demna’s tech vision for the brand.) Where projects like Gucci’s digital Sneaker Garage or Roblox garden were introduced, Barilaro says these initiatives were driven by the brand marketing team as a way to position the house as a digital and cultural innovator. But Michele’s approach as creative director is what enabled those experiments to come to fruition. “To me, that’s the trade-off with creative directors. It can be someone that doesn’t fully understand how to actually create the project in question, but if they’re forward-thinking and support it, that’s how you get this digital creative positioning,” Barilaro adds. TikTok content That Michele was succeeded at Gucci by Demna, the creative director with perhaps the most tech-forward reputation, could fill the gaps left by the innovation team. “It’s a good example of where Demna feels right, because Gucci has already been experimenting with emerging technologies and their applications across multiple sources — from crypto payments in their stores to several experiments across the metaverse and Web3,” says Drinkwater. So far, Gucci has released one creative campaign that’s been made using AI: a TikTok video showcasing models in Gucci designs walking through a city, accompanied by #GenerationGucci. In Balenciaga’s new era under Pierpaolo Piccioli (previously Valentino), Pisano and Drinkwater each predicted that Demna’s deliberate attempt to use tech across campaigns will likely come to an end. While Piccioli made one of fashion’s first creative experiments with AI at Valentino in 2021, for the brand’s haute couture project, Code Temporal, his first collection for Balenciaga in October explored what it is to be human, aka the antithesis of AI. (Balenciaga did not respond to our request for comment on Piccoli’s vision.) Where AI meets craft and creativity While brands’ recent focus on craft as a core brand narrative has mostly been interpreted as a rejection of AI’s automation of once-manual tasks, creatives actually working with the tech stress that the question of creativity is separate from artistic tools. “I think there will be a new craft of AI, because it’s interesting that the algorithms on their own cannot produce good art or good imagery; you still need a really talented creative to be feeding the prompts, and kind of briefing and modeling the AI,” says Charlie Smith, the former CMO of Loewe, who decamped to join retro tech brand Nothing as chief brand officer. “That’s why there’s a lot of really bad AI art out there, because there’s a lot of bad art in the world in general.” So far at Loewe, the playful social media presence that began under Anderson’s reign has continued under Proenza Schouler founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, who took over the house’s design in March 2025. In December, the brand posted a TikTok video featuring AI-generated images, alongside an influencer attempting to discern whether the visuals were “real or AI”. Meanwhile, on the brand’s main Instagram account, the pair have been exploring the brand’s reputation for craftsmanship via digital animations of handcrafted illustrations. Since Anderson joined Dior as sole creative director in June, the brand hasn’t made any deliberate moves into AI-generated content. But the brand — and its wider LVMH Group ownership — has publicized its investment in AI tools for backend operations. Smith points to an interesting trend emerging on social media, where every time a brand posts a particularly standout or surreal image, it spawns a proliferation of user comments assuming that it must be AI. “People no longer believe things that look really good or kind of crazy, because maybe they’re just fake,” he says. “So I think that’s also a very interesting societal shift.” And even if, under their new creative directors, brands decide to take a specific anti-AI stance when it comes to social media and marketing campaigns, Smith posits that “nearly every” brand is using AI for creative functions in some way, at least behind the scenes. No longer a nice-to-have The luxury slowdown has yet to fully let up, even as market analysts predict a modest rebound in 2026. Creative directors are under unprecedented pressure to imagine a new brand vision with the hopes of reinvigorating sales. At the same time, AI is a technology heralded for its potential to save companies money — its use cases span fashion’s backend operations, as well as frontend creative outputs. This stands in contrast to the Web3-slash-NFT fashion-tech boom, which analysts say was a pure marketing play. Creative directors must also contend with the fear that AI puts even more creative jobs at risk. It’s a divisive time that experts say will likely increase the gulf between creative directors who respond to the AI evolution by experimenting with the tech itself, and those who make a statement against it by doubling down on heritage and craftsmanship. “In the next year, you’ll have some brands that will come out as really strongly anti-AI, because they view it as a kind of flex to say: ‘We are going to stick to real creative direction with real people and real jobs,” says Pisano. “We’ll definitely see some who view it as adding a level of prestige, signaling we still have the money to do these full concepts [without AI].” Others say that this can only last so long. “There are going to be designers who more openly embrace it than others, in the same way there are designers who are anti-social media,” Smith says. “But I would say that, even if designers are anti-social media, eventually they’ve had to come to the table. It’s more a question of who’s going to lead; I don’t think there’s going to be a possibility of not using it at all.” Operators across the fashion industry say most brands are already filling the resource gap with AI behind the scenes — even those whose brand ethos is rooted in heritage and craft. “AI is so all-encompassing,” adds Smith. “A very obvious and quick shift that will soon happen is that designers are going to start using AI to model potential design options, and that way, again, it’s going to speed up the design process to get to the prototype stage.” It’s this ubiquity factor that experts say makes AI an inevitable part of the creative director conversation going forward, and distinguishes the AI era from fashion’s brief flirtation with the metaverse. “The post-metaverse era presents an opportunity for the fashion industry to recalibrate its teenage perspective on digital innovation and augmented reality,” says Young. “It’s a new palette that doesn’t need a big announcement. The creative directors that will steal the show are those that embrace the opportunity to expand their creative toolboxes, using CGI, AI and spatial computing to be even more creative.”