What are some robots doing at the Milan fashion show?
On September 22nd, the first day of Milan Fashion Week, during the Vogue World fashion show at the imposing Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, there were two people visibly uncomfortable with what they were seeing. Miuccia Prada – head designer of her eponymous brand – and Alessandro Michele – creative director of Valentino – two of the heavyweights of the global fashion scene, were clearly wrinkling their noses while the rest of the attendees applauded, enthralled by the spectacle. The reason? The appearance of four humanoid robots from the Chinese company Unitree acting as acrobats among the models, presented under the title The age of intelligence. While the audience responded with enthusiasm, Prada and Michele seemed to be among the few who did not find it amusing. Perhaps because, behind the spectacle, they saw something more than four robots doing somersaults: the irruption of artificial intelligence into a world, that of fashion, which until now had made the body, hands, tradition, and human creativity its reason for being.
It is clear that the emergence of AI forces us to rethink the conception of the world we have known until now, which will never be the same again. And if AI is transforming every corner of our existence, it is also transforming fashion. As happened with both industrial revolutions, the first and the second, all the professions involved are being modified, and many could be doomed to disappear. While initially we were reassured by being told that it would only streamline repetitive and mechanical tasks and leave creative ones intact, we are realizing that this is not the case.
AI can generate hundreds of creative proposals, and end up reducing the designer to a mere selector of ideas and fundamentally transforming the authorial dimension. Manufacturing processes are also altered and affect professions such as pattern making. In fashion photography, AI allows for changing backgrounds, creating locations, animating photographs, or generating new ones from pre-existing ones. And if it is only necessary to photograph a model's body against a neutral background to digitally apply everything else, what will become of location photographers, lighting crews, or set designers? This assuming that one starts from the body of a real model to extract a digital twin, and not from the body of a model generated entirely with AI. In both cases, if the real person disappears, the professions linked to makeup, hairdressing, styling, catering, transport, or post-production also disappear, as well as the models themselves and the agencies that represent them. And we cannot forget the impact of AI on trend forecasting.
But we must not understand this situation solely as the replacement of people and professions. The change is deeper: it is altering what we understand by creative work. One of the properties of human beings that distinguish them from other living beings, the ability to create, is also being questioned, as is happening with thought itself, which we are outsourcing without yet understanding the scope of this decision. Elon Musk recently stated a few days ago that AI could surpass the sum of all human intelligence within about five years.
The Vogue World spectacle, in fact, judging by the previous promotional videos and the title it bore –Where the future is made by the hand–, aimed to be a defense of Italian craftsmanship against artificial intelligence. But how difficult it must be to defend this premise when among the sponsors there were, among others, Meta Glasses and OpenAI. How difficult it is for fashion to maintain craftsmanship and human creativity when, given the economic fragility of any creative activity, it now counts among its main backers the great technocrats: from Jeff Bezos at the Met Gala to Mark Zuckerberg as a permanent guest in the front rows of fashion weeks. How difficult it is to be ethically consistent when the future is in the hands of those who work, precisely, so that human hands and minds cease to be essential.