Fashion has stopped surprising us, and AI isn't to blame

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September 2022, Paris. Bella Hadid steps onto the runway wearing almost nothing—perhaps only the certainty that something extraordinary is about to happen. For fifteen minutes, a team armed with spray guns works directly on her body, and what gradually emerges is a white dress, created in mid-air before everyone’s eyes.

No one had ever seen anything like it before, and no one was entirely sure what they were witnessing. Within forty-eight hours, that image had traveled around the world, generating $26 million in Media Impact Value, becoming a global pop culture moment, and sparking the kind of conversation that transcends the boundaries of fashion and reaches anyone with a smartphone.

It was fashion doing exactly what fashion has always been capable of doing—yet does far too rarely today: creating a moment, drawing a clear line between before and after, suspending time just long enough to make people desire something they didn’t even know they wanted a second earlier. That evening in Paris, technology wasn’t the story; wonder was. Coperni, the brand behind that show, had been founded by Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant in 2013. It wasn’t a historic couture house, nor the product of a luxury conglomerate. It was simply two designers with a clear vision—and the willingness to surprise without asking for permission. That spray-painted dress became a symbol of what fashion can achieve when its point of view is bold enough to risk looking ridiculous.

Now let’s fast-forward.

 

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In June 2025, the Paris Commercial Court placed Coperni under judicial reorganization after Tomorrow—the distribution group and majority shareholder—failed to provide the financial resources it had committed to, leaving the company unable to meet its obligations.

To simplify: a brand capable of generating $26 million in media value in just 48 hours was struggling to pay its suppliers. And that wasn’t because it lacked vision. It lacked the structure—and the system—needed to support that vision.

Three years after that runway show, the fashion industry has become obsessed with artificial intelligence. The conversation is everywhere: at conferences, in editorial meetings, in marketing departments. AI is portrayed as a threat to creativity, as a replacement for designers, as the cause of the growing visual sameness surrounding us. It’s a legitimate debate, of course, but it is also leading the industry to look in the wrong direction. Because technology isn’t the real problem.

The real problem is something else—and, unfortunately, it’s far more difficult to solve.

When the Quarter Won Over the Vision

To understand where surprise went, we first need to understand where power went. With very few exceptions, today’s major fashion brands no longer belong to their founders, the families who built them, or the designers who shaped their creative language. They belong to publicly listed luxury groups that answer to shareholders every quarter with results that must be measurable, comparable, and defensible.

In that environment, creative risk—the real kind, the kind that can fail spectacularly before becoming iconic—has no KPI. It doesn’t fit into a business plan, nor does it make for an easy boardroom presentation, even though those have increasingly become the metrics by which success is judged.

One publication that has consistently articulated this argument, with a level of clarity rarely found in mainstream fashion discourse, is the Italian magazine Rivista Studio. Time and again, it has made the same point: the industry is no longer made up of family-owned brands guided by long-term vision, but of corporate groups whose primary responsibility is to satisfy markets and investors.

And when profit dictates the creative calendar, the first thing to disappear is precisely what made fashion culturally relevant in the first place: creativity itself—the unexpected gesture, expensive, gloriously unnecessary, and made without any guarantee of return.

The system is no longer built on family-owned brands, but on corporate conglomerates driven by profit and accountable to the market. When profit dictates the creative calendar, the first thing to disappear is exactly that: creativity, the unexpected gesture, costly, beautifully unnecessary, and made without any guarantee of return. The system is no longer built on family-owned brands, but on corporate conglomerates driven by profit and accountable to the market.

When profit dictates the creative calendar,
the first thing to disappear is exactly that:
creativity, the unexpected gesture, costly,
beautifully unnecessary, and made
without any guarantee of return.

The numbers make this point almost self-evident, and Gucci’s story illustrates it better than any other example.Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s Creative Director from 2015 to 2022, built a ten-billion-dollar empire on unapologetic maximalism: bold logos, layered cultural references, and a highly polarizing aesthetic that divided opinion—and precisely because of that, captivated audiences, sparked conversation, and made Gucci impossible to ignore.

Then, in November 2022, Michele left—or was asked to leave; the official version has never been entirely clear. His successor steered the brand toward quiet luxury, presenting the shift as a necessary course correction: cleaner lines, a restrained color palette, a more understated aesthetic. The outcome—although reality is always more complex than any single explanation—was a 25% decline in revenue in the third quarter of 2023, one of the sharpest drops ever recorded by a luxury house of Gucci’s scale. Kering went on to report a 46% decline in net profit for the first half of 2024. During the same period, Hermès posted 16% growth.

These are, of course, different brands with different creative identities. But more importantly, they operate under fundamentally different governance models. Hermès remains family-controlled, guided by a vision measured in decades. Kering answers to shareholders. The difference between the two, therefore, is not merely stylistic—it is structural.

Gucci’s story contains one final layer of irony. The system made the wrong decision twice in succession: first by abandoning a creative vision that was working in order to chase the prevailing trend, then by seeking refuge in an aesthetic that was never truly part of the brand’s DNA. The pendulum swung from one extreme to the other without ever finding the center—which, history repeatedly reminds us, is where enduring points of view are built.

How COVID Changed Consumer Desire—and Why Brands Were Too Slow to Notice

But reality is always more complex than it first appears, and fashion has always been a reflection of its time. There is another factor the industry has struggled to absorb—one that has quietly but systematically deepened the current creative crisis.

The pandemic, unfortunately, did more than force thousands of stores to close and accelerate the shift to online shopping. It fundamentally changed the way people relate to objects, desire, and spending. Consumption became more intentional, more selective, and less impulsive. Markets contracted, in many countries sharply and for the long term.

As a result, the consumer who emerged from the pandemic is not the same one who entered it. Today’s consumer is more skeptical, better informed, and less willing to pay for the promise of a status symbol that no longer feels authentic.

For the most part, however, the fashion industry’s response was the wrong one. Brands increased the volume of campaigns, collaborations, and product drops. They expanded onto more platforms, partnered with more influencers, and filled more dates on the marketing calendar.

As if the problem were the quantity of visibility rather than the quality of the creative gesture.

The findings of the BoF–McKinsey State of Fashion 2024 report are telling: 68% of consumers say they are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sponsored content produced by fashion brands, while 65% trust influencers lessthan they did three years ago. Adding to the challenge, Generation Z’s active attention span for advertising drops after just 1.3 seconds.

In short, the evidence suggests this isn’t apathy—it is self-defense against a system that has communicated too much while saying too little.

Saturation no longer seems like a temporary phase. The fashion industry has turned it into the permanent condition in which it operates. And in that condition, surprise becomes structurally impossible, because surprise, by definition, requires contrast—or at the very least, a moment of silence beforehand. Perhaps, in the end, surprise simply requires someone, somewhere, to resist the urge to occupy every available space.

Silence as Both an Answer and a Dead End

For a few seasons, the market rewarded those who chose the opposite of surprise. I’m referring to brands like The Row, Loro Piana, and Brunello Cucinelli. Quiet luxury proved highly effective for a time, offering a rational response to consumers exhausted by hype—consumers who had become more selective and increasingly drawn to reassuring, understated narratives.

The result was an era defined by the absence of logos, with little room for bold gestures or provocation. The formula delivered solid financial results and a story the market probably needed to hear after years of excess.

But fashion, as we’ve said, is always a reflection of its time. And in the end, the times struck back in the most ironic—and unforgiving—way possible.

Quiet luxury was ultimately undone by its own success. When Succession, HBO’s portrait of ultra-wealthy elites dressed in cashmere and virtually no visible logos, became a global phenomenon, Google searches for “quiet luxury” surged by 614% in just a few months. Publications such as Rolling Stone were even publishing guides on how to recreate the Roy family’s look “on a budget.”

The luxury that wasn’t supposed to be noticed had become the season’s most imitated trend. The if you know, you knowaesthetic had landed on TikTok. And the moment that happened, it was already over.

Not because of AI. Not because of a creative shift. But because even silence, once turned into a formula, produces the very boredom it promised to cure.

The fashion industry has found itself in a dead end. Hype no longer works. Quiet luxury has exhausted its cultural momentum. And genuine surprise—the kind that demands risk, time, and conviction—no longer has the structural space in which to exist.

The Numbers Behind Fashion's Transformation

 

Why Surprise Has Become Harder Than Ever

$26M
The Media Impact Value generated in just 48 hours by Coperni’s spray-on dress.
68%
Of consumers say they are overwhelmed by the volume of sponsored content from fashion brands.
+614%
Increase in Google searches for “quiet luxury,” turning aesthetic restraint into fashion’s most imitated trend.

The Question the Industry Struggles to Ask

Artificial intelligence will inevitably become part of fashion’s creative process—indeed, in some areas it already has, and in ways that can be genuinely useful and interesting. But AI is ultimately a tool. And tools, by their very nature, amplify the intentions of those who use them.

If the system adopting them has already abandoned risk, patience, bold creative gestures, and the willingness to take a stand, then AI will simply produce those same outcomes more efficiently: form without surprise, execution without a point of view.

The real question the fashion system should be asking is not how to integrate new technology, but whether it still has the courage to hold a real vision worth integrating in the first place.

That evening in Paris, in 2022, someone decided to spray a dress onto a model in front of three hundred people—with no safety net and no certainty of the outcome. It was an expensive gesture, a risky one, and one that could easily have ended in ridicule.

Instead, it became the last moment when the fashion industry—insiders and the general public alike—stopped and watched in genuine amazement.

Technology was present, but it wasn’t the point. What truly mattered was that someone still had a point of view strong enough to bet on it.

AI didn’t take that ability away from us. We lost it ourselves the moment we decided that quarterly results mattered more than vision—and more than values.

Daniela Vignoli

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I’ve spent over twenty years helping brands figure out not just how to communicate, but what they actually stand for. My background spans fashion, lifestyle and retail — always at the intersection of business strategy, brand identity and organizational culture. Today I work in advisory mode. I’m also co-founder of Edda Studio, an agency dedicated to author marketing and literary positioning.