Generative AI in Fashion: Creativity, Authorship, and the Battle for Exclusivity

Generative Artificial Intelligence became mainstream nearly three years ago, and fast fashion brands quickly realized its potential. In a market defined by speed and constant reinvention, these tools allow companies to detect trends earlier, design faster, and experiment at scale. Desigual has publicly acknowledged using AI to expand its creative universe and improve operations, while Walmart turns trend data into AI-generated mood boards ready for product development. It is essentially like having a design team working nonstop, without constraints.

But this raises an important question: if AI can create collections, what does this mean for luxury fashion, haute couture, and designers whose creative identity is the foundation of their brand?

Traditional AI: the silent partner that never appears on the catwalk

Before Generative AI entered the spotlight, fashion had already integrated traditional AI into its backstage. Machine learning systems have long optimized stock levels, predicted demand, adjusted prices in real time, and personalized marketing campaigns. Their influence is rarely visible to the consumer, but without these systems, stores would often be stocked with the wrong products and sizes.

Traditional AI has never been contested because it does not challenge the essence of fashion: authorship and creativity. It is an operational assistant, not a creative contributor.

Generative AI: a catalyst for fast fashion, a debate for luxury

Generative AI changes the narrative entirely. Instead of managing collections, it can generate them. This is ideal for fast fashion, where consumers prioritize affordability and immediacy over the name behind the design. In this segment, AI-generated product ideas or AI-based advertising avatars are simply new tools that enable speed, volume, and efficiency.

Luxury, however, plays by different rules. Here, the creative process is inseparable from the value of the final piece. A couture garment draws meaning from the designer’s hand, their story, and their singular perspective. If AI participates in the creative act, does a piece lose part of its identity? Or does the designer’s direction, curation, and approval still guarantee authorship? This debate touches the foundation of exclusivity: origin matters.

What makes a sketch a masterpiece?

Accessibility is both the strength and the weak spot of Generative AI.

What works perfectly for fast fashion can undermine luxury, where scarcity, mystique, and the aura of human creativity are central to perceived value.

A hand-drawn sketch by a designer at three in the morning carries an emotional and symbolic weight that an AI-generated image cannot replicate. One can be auctioned for thousands; the other can be reproduced infinitely. It is no coincidence that high-end brands like Gucci speak of AI as an operational enhancer, not a creative substitute. In luxury, the machine may support the process but cannot become the muse.

The future: designers as curators of intelligent creation

Still, the true transformation may lie not in whether brands use AI, but in how they use it. Luxury will not reject AI; it will integrate it selectively and intelligently.

‍‍The creative role will evolve toward curation, where the designer orchestrates possibilities generated by AI and refines them into something uniquely theirs.

A dress remains exclusive not because it avoids AI, but because a visionary artist shapes AI-generated ideas with distinctive taste, cultural references, and identity.

The ability to visualize a garment instantly acrossdifferent body types and contexts illustrates the power of these tools. For anybrand, this is a strategic advantage: exploring concepts before committing toproduction.

In fashion, technology is a tool, but storytelling is the product

Fast fashion will continue adopting AI openly, using it to produce trends quickly and at low cost. Luxury must preserve the symbolic power that defines its value. If consumers perceive a premium design as algorithmic or mass-produced, its allure may diminish.

Ultimately, fashion has always sold more than fabric. It sells origin, intention, and narrative. As AI becomes embedded in the creative process, the industry will need to decide which parts of that story to reveal and which to keep in the studio’s shadows.

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