Case Study

The Complete
Playbook for Generative
AI in Fashion
By Marc Bain From ChatGPT to Midjourney to Runway, the emerging technology
June 2023
is already showing why it could be one of the most consequential in
decades for the fashion industry. Early adopters and experts unpack the
opportunities and challenges of putting gen AI to use to design products,
create campaigns and other content, and better connect with customers.
Executive Summary
In 2018, an artist named Robbie Barrat conceived an and interviews in spring 2023. That said, four key
entire fashion collection in the style of Balenciaga strategic areas have already emerged for fashion,
using artificial intelligence. Barrat had to train his enabling this case study to showcase the state of
own AI model on images of existing looks he gathered play in product design, visual content creation,
himself, and the output wasn’t perfect. Much of it copywriting, and shopping and customer experience.
appeared smudged and distorted. But it was enough To help build out the knowledge provided in this
to capture fashion’s attention, landing him an case study, brands and retailers such as Revolve,
interview with Ssense and a collaboration with Acne Casablanca Paris, Frame, Snipes, Levi’s and Zalando;
Studios. technology providers such as Salesforce, Amazon
and Shopify; and other AI-focused experts share real
Just a few years later, anyone with a computer can
examples of putting this emerging technology to use
essentially create a collection — with less work and
and what they have been learning in the process.
more photorealistic results than Barrat’s earlier
attempt — using new generative-AI tools. See page 17 for a glossary of key terms.
Generative AI, which describes machine learning
algorithms capable of creating new content, is set to
have a major impact on fashion brands. Trained on Exhibit 1: Money Magnets
a sufficient number of examples, these algorithms
Even as the tech industry faces a wider funding drought, generative AI’s big players
recognise the underlying patterns and structures in
are attracting high valuations.
data and create novel examples of their own. Some
tools, such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable
Valuations (May 2023)
Diffusion, can produce images. Others, such as
USD (billions)
ChatGPT, can generate text. Still others are capable
of making videos, like Runway. But all are able to
OpenAI
create their content from text prompts, promising a Foundation model
29.0
wide array of uses.
Anthropic
Though generative AI grabbed attention with the 4.4
Foundation model
deluge of user-generated memes it unleashed online,
Cohere
like a video reimagining the Harry Potter movies Foundation model
2.0
in the style of Balenciaga, its greatest impact could
be on businesses. Tech giants such as Microsoft Hugging Face
2.0
Foundation model
and Google are racing to incorporate it into their
core products, while industries from healthcare to Lightricks
1.8
finance are looking for ways to use it to lift labour Image/video

productivity and a wave of start-ups are building Runway

1.5
enterprise applications. Goldman Sachs analysts Image/video
estimate that, once generative AI is widely adopted, it
Jasper
could boost US productivity by 1.5 percentage points Text (copywriting)
1.5
per year for a decade, ultimately increasing S&P 500
profits 30 percent or more over that period. Replit
1.2
Text (code)
Fashion is set to experience generative AI-influenced Inflection
growth of its own. While the industry is just starting Natural language interface
1.2
to explore the technology’s potential, McKinsey &
Company estimates that in the next three to five Adept
1.0
Natural language interface
years it could add between $150 billion and $275
billion to the operating profits of the apparel, fashion Character.ai
1.0
Natural language interface
and luxury sectors. It is already beginning to shake
up areas such as design, marketing and customer Stability.ai
1.0
service. Foundation model

As various parts of the fashion industry value Glean

1.0
Natural language interface
chain test and adopt the technology, this case study
explores the opportunities, challenges and risks
for both brands and their employees. However, Source: CB Insights
the field is changing rapidly and use cases were
a work in progress as we conducted our research

Have you been sent this case study? Read more deep-dive analysis with a BoF Professional membership at businessoffashion.com/
memberships or contact professional@businessoffashion.com

businessoffashion.com 2
History and Context

Decades in the Making

Exhibit 2: The Rise of Generative AI

2019 February: GPT-2 comes out with 1.5 billion parameters

2012 Breakthroughs in deep learning allow for major
— a measure of the model’s size and complexity.
advances in fields like computer vision and natural
language processing.
March: China’s Baidu issues its counter to Google’s
BERT, called ERNIE, or Enhanced Representation
2013 Through Knowledge Integration.

July: Microsoft and OpenAI sign a multi-year

2014 Ian Goodfellow introduces generative adversarial partnership that includes a $1 billion investment by
networks, which use competition between two neural Microsoft.
networks to produce realistic imagery.
2020 May: GPT-3 goes live, boasting 175 billion parameters.
2015 March: Researchers invent the diffusion model, which
learns to produce imagery from noise and is the basis 2021 January: OpenAI releases its image generator, DALL-E.
of image generators such as DALL-E 2 and Stable
Diffusion.
2022 March: Midjourney, an AI image generator, goes live on
a Discord server.
June: Google launches Deep Dream, a model that
becomes popular online for its psychedelic imagery.
April: DALL-E 2 arrives. Google announces a
540-billion parameter transformer, called Pathways
December: OpenAI is founded as a non-profit research
Language Model.
lab. (It will drop the non-profit status in 2019.)
May: Meta releases its Open Pretrained Transformer
2016 language model. Google announces Imagen, an image-
generating diffusion model.
2017 June: Google creates the first transformer model, a
August: Stability.ai launches text-to-image model Stable
form of deep learning that takes raw text and learns the
Diffusion.
relationships between words, laying the foundation for
models like GPT.
September: Meta unveils Make-A-Video, which
generates video from text prompts.
2018 June: OpenAI releases GPT, which stands for
“generative pre-trained transformer.” November: OpenAI releases ChatGPT.

October: Google unveils BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder
Representations for Transformers, a language model it
uses to better understand search intent.
2023 January: Microsoft announces $10 billion investment in
OpenAI.
May: Google unveils new experimental search
experience powered by generative AI.

What makes generative AI so promising
for fashion is its capacity to quickly
produce high-quality content as well
as understand and recreate natural
language. While these capabilities are just
becoming widely accessible, they’re built
on foundations that reach back decades.
The field of AI began gathering
momentum in the 1950s, when scientists
and mathematicians, believing machines
could one day begin to learn and reason
on their own, laid the foundations of
modern computer science. (Famed
British mathematician Alan Turing,
who helped crack Germany’s Enigma
code in World War II, was one of its
pioneers.) Because of the high costs and
limited power of computers, progress
was slow, but over the years, and despite
occasional setbacks, researchers made
breakthroughs that still underpin AI
today.
They developed neural networks, which
use sets of algorithms arranged in
interconnected node layers to mimic
the workings of the human brain, and
devised deep learning techniques that
allow computers to better understand
“unstructured” and complex data,
including text or images. Leaps in
computing power enabled advances.
Around 2012, an inflection point arrived
as deep learning led to dramatic gains
in AI fields like computer vision. AI has
continued to improve and become more
available to industries, letting fashion
companies adopt it for purposes such as
demand forecasting, identifying their
most valuable customers, managing
markdowns more effectively and battling
counterfeits.
Generative AI is the next step in this
evolution, and the excitement around the
technology and range of applications has
led to an influx of investment. Though

businessoffashion.com 3
History and Context

the total value of venture capital deals in

Exhibit 3: Generating Deals
generative AI globally fell from $5 billion
Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI in 2023 pushed funding for generative AI in 2021 to $4 billion in 2022 as inflation,
to new heights after the market slowed in 2022 amid a broader downturn. rising interest rates and recession
concerns depressed the market, the
Generative AI global deals (2012–May 2023) Deal count number of deals still increased, according
Deal value (USD, billions) to Pitchbook, a funding database. Relative
to the broader technology landscape, it
has proved “resilient against the market
downturn,” noted Ali Javaheri, an
15 Includes OpenAI Microsoft 400
deal worth $10bn
associate analyst of emerging technology
at Pitchbook.
12.6
304 By May 2023, funding surged past
286 300 previous years — mostly because of
10
Microsoft’s $10 billion investment
in OpenAI, announced in January.
191 Companies like OpenAI that are building
200 what are called foundation models,
which are trained on huge volumes of
125 5.1
4.6
data and capable of being applied to an
5
array of tasks rather than just narrow,
83 118
100 tailored uses, are drawing the most
0.4
0.04 0.04 55 2.1 money, Javaheri said, while those making
0.1 1.6
15 24 30 specific text-based applications, such as
3 7 0.3 0.4 for copywriting, are also attracting a good
0.1
0 0 deal of interest.
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023*
A variety of industries are trying to take
advantage of generative AI’s potential.
* YTD until May 25, 2023 The prestigious architecture firm
Zaha Hadid Architects is using image
Source: Pitchbook
generators to help produce building
designs, its head, Patrik Schumacher, said
in a roundtable discussion hosted by the
platform DigitalFutures in April 2023.
Lawyers are also exploring it as a way to
automate tedious work like reviewing
documents.
Exhibit 4: Big Backers
For fashion businesses, the technology
True to their reputation for tech investments, Silicon Valley-based companies are
presents a variety of possible uses
leading the global pack in funding generative AI deals.
and benefits. Based on moves already
publicly announced by brands, retailers
Largest investors in global generative AI by deal count (Jan 2012–May 2023)
and technology providers, as well as
conversations with companies and
Investor Deal Count Investor Type experts, BoF identifies four of the most
immediate opportunities generative AI
offers:
1 Y Combinator 43 Accelerator/Incubator
1. Enhance and support creativity
1. Enhance and support creativity
2 Andreessen Horowitz 34 Venture Capital 2. Augment and hyper-personalise
customer-facing content and services
2. Augment and hyper-personalise
3 Sequoia Capital 32 Venture Capital
3. Reduce costs or complexity
customer-facing ofservices
content and
ambitious projects
3. Reduce costs or complexity of
4. Automate manual tasks
4 Khosla Ventures 25 Venture Capital ambitious projects

4. Automate manual tasks

5 Bloomberg Beta 23 Corporate Venture Capital

Source: Pitchbook

businessoffashion.com 4
Market Opportunities and Challenges
Playing to Generative AI’s Strengths
Up and Down the Value Chain
Exhibit 5: How Generative AI Plugs into Fashion’s Value Chain
Generative AI can be used across the product lifecycle, reducing lead times, creating efficiencies and unlocking new ideas.
Generate design variations
and new ideas
Generative AI’s opportunities are present
to varying degrees across use cases.
Companies that leverage the technology
in these areas stand to benefit on multiple
levels, while potentially bolstering
operating profits, as McKinsey noted.
“We’ve seen it a number of times also
in more ‘classic’ data and IT projects,”
said Holger Harreis, a senior partner
at McKinsey. By raising productivity,
streamlining product development and
reducing time to market, he noted, “what
we’ve seen in the rearview mirror is
actually the biggest impact contribution
came from increasing revenues.”
For generative AI, the effects may not be
equal across all parts of the value chain.
In supply chains, generative AI could
be used to summarise data or automate
filling out paperwork, but uses that more
fundamentally shift how companies
operate in the near term are less clear.
The greatest opportunities are probably
in the areas that play directly to
generative AI’s strengths. These include
tasks related to design, marketing and
customer interactions, such as generating
design ideas, creating imagery for use
in campaigns or online, and powering
chatbots and clienteling tools.
businessoffashion.com
Streamline copywriting
Produce visual content
and automate content-
and marketing imagery
generating tasks
The ease with which a company
integrates generative AI into its
operations will depend on how much
it expects the technology to do and
how much customisation is needed.
Uses incorporating customer data or
combining it with proprietary technology
can require more technical expertise, but
for basic tasks, even lean start-ups can get
going quickly by using one of the growing
number of AI tools on the market.
“In principle, you could [integrate
generative AI] with a very small and
relatively low-sophistication IT team,”
Harreis said, “because for many of those
things, there are dedicated apps or
solutions as a service.”
Protecting People and Brands
The technology carries notable risks.
Chief among them is the effect on staff,
who may need to learn new skills, such
as how to prompt an AI tool to produce
the desired outcome, or take on new
roles, such as editing AI-generated text
rather than purely writing their own.
Others could be displaced, a possibility
companies need to weigh seriously. AI can
also replicate existing biases in any data
it uses, including racial and gender biases.
Provide more personalised
product suggestions and
customer service
An AI-generated image might feature
more revealing clothing on a woman than
a man, for example. It can also suffer from
technical shortcomings, like ChatGPT’s
tendency to get facts wrong.
Companies using AI could face backlash
or even be drawn into legal challenges
by creatives who say their work was
used to train AI systems. The situation
raises new legal questions around
intellectual property, like how much
protection a brand can expect on an
AI-generated design. Although in the
opinion of Anthony Lupo, an attorney
focused on fashion and technology at law
firm ArentFox Schiff, it shouldn’t deter
companies at this stage from exploring
and experimenting with generative AI.
“You should be leaning into this, because
if you aren’t, your competitor will be and
you will be left in the dust,” Lupo said.
To get started, companies should analyse
their entire value chain, determine the
problems they want to solve or processes
they need to improve and consider where
generative AI can help with tasks or add
value.
5
Strategy

Where Fashion Meets

Generative AI
01 — Design

Revolve created a capsule collection based on its AI-generated campaign with creative agency Maison Meta, but turning the AI designs into physical garments wasn’t always easy.
Revolve.

In April 2023, drivers heading towards see what the outcome might look like or
Opportunities Palm Springs on California’s Interstate explore entirely new ideas.
10 would have seen multiple billboards
It does come with challenges. AI-
Enhance and support creativity posted by online retailer Revolve
generated designs may still need manual
featuring models in trippy landscapes
Augment and hyper-personalise edits and integrating the process into
full of giant mushrooms or flowers.
customer-facing content and services existing workflows can be tricky because
The images, down to the models and
it doesn’t consider real-world factors
clothing, were AI-generated and created
Reduce costs or complexity of like fabrics and construction. But it
for Revolve by Maison Meta, a creative
ambitious projects nonetheless offers a potentially powerful
agency specialising in AI.
creative tool.
Automate manual tasks That month, Revolve’s first drop of a
“Product design is a prime opportunity,”
limited capsule collection with pieces
Harreis of McKinsey said. “I don’t think
from the campaign went live for pre-
we should believe that, right now, the
order, giving consumers the opportunity
machine could take over everything,
to buy clothes designed by generative AI.
but supporting that process is highly
Design is one of the clearest and enhancing.”
potentially most significant use cases
Designers can easily begin creating
for the technology, aligning neatly with
imagery with AI image generators such as
its ability to produce new content. It
Midjourney, Stable Diffusion or OpenAI’s
provides designers a means to quickly
DALL-E, starting from text prompts or
whip up countless variations of a concept,
images they upload. (Users should be
mash together a mix of inspirations and

businessoffashion.com 6
Strategy
aware that they may need to take steps
with tools like Midjourney if they don’t
want their output to be publicly visible.)
Revolve, while exploring how it can use
the technology for its private labels, has
found it can shorten the time involved
in coming up with and visualising new
concepts.
“We were developing a bomber jacket
and we were able to generate, in a matter
of minutes, a lot of different variations,
versus — if someone was going to sketch
it — it would take hours,” said Michael
Mente, Revolve’s co-founder and co-
chief executive. “We were able to put
together pieces and see different pocket
placements, different pocket details,
different collars. … Our buying team
could say, ‘The pocket size from this
one. Take the collar from this one.’ Put it
together, go and then send it up to develop
samples.”
It still requires a human’s ideas, effort
and an understanding of how to prompt
the AI to get good results, though.
Designers may find they need to be
as descriptive as possible about every
feature of the garment, down to fabrics,
trims and specific design details. When
Maison Meta in April 2023 organised
an AI Fashion Week, which included a
competition that will see Revolve produce
the collections of the three winners,
many designers were secretive about their
prompts, treating them as their “secret
The leather jacket from Revolve’s capsule collection
with Maison Meta had to be hand painted to match the
AI-generated design. Revolve.
businessoffashion.com
sauce,” Cyril Foiret, Maison Meta’s
founder, told BoF.
Design Approaches
There are different approaches designers
can take to using generative AI. If they’re
trying to get ideas for physical garments,
they may want to start with broad
descriptions.
“Best practice right now is you use AI to
go way wider than you would necessarily
go before, just due to the manpower of
sketching out that many ideas, and then
the role of the user becomes more than
ever an editor,” said Andrew Wyatt,
co-founder and chief executive of Cala,
an all-in-one platform for designing and
producing clothes that has incorporated
DALL-E via an API, or application
programming interface, from OpenAI.
In Cala, users start from a template of
an item — it had about 40 as of spring
2023, including clothing and accessories
— and can insert adjectives like “edgy”
or “minimalist,” describing the desired
design in one text field and details and
trims in another to generate designs.
Wyatt said based on how many times
they’re pinging the DALL-E API, some
users are creating dozens of iterations of a
design as they try to zero in on what they
want.
Designers may find it difficult to produce
concepts that match their established
visual language when using systems
trained on general internet imagery. Erik
Torstensson, co-founder and creative
director of fashion label Frame, said he’s
been experimenting with training his
own model using the tool Runway. He
styled numerous looks on a model with
past Frame pieces and a few vintage
items, fed those pictures into Runway and
generated new designs bearing his “DNA,”
as he put it.
Though Frame isn’t formally using
generative AI for clothing yet,
Torstensson has used the technology to
produce designs for furniture he said
will be in Frame stores. Cala also offers
templates for packaging. Roger Roberts,
a technology expert at McKinsey, said
physical spaces, like store interiors, are
another area of opportunity in design.
Not a Magic Bullet
With any AI tool, designs still generally
require manual editing with separate
software. If a company wants to add
branding such as a logo, that would
need to be done manually, since AI tools
generally won’t recreate them. Changing
a colour or shortening sleeves without
generating an entire new image also
typically means manual edits.
Another wrinkle is that, for now, the
images are two-dimensional, so the
design may only show the front of an item,
leaving the designer to create the rest of
the garment, like the back, themselves.
But there are tech companies working on
3D generative AI.
Because AI can produce concepts that
are difficult or impossible to construct,
companies may not be able to easily
turn all their AI-generated concepts
into finished products. A physical
leather jacket from Revolve’s capsule
collection with Maison Meta required
hand-painting to replicate the graphic
detailing of the AI image. Pattern makers
and manufacturers may find themselves
struggling to stay faithful to the original
vision.
“It is a potentially disrupting workflow,”
Mente said. Even so, he added that the
process of making the capsule collection
was overall “smooth, fun and enjoyable
— and also with some important lessons
learned.”
A further area of caution brands should
be aware of involves intellectual
property. Plaintiffs ranging from Getty
Images to a group of artists have filed
lawsuits against AI companies alleging
infringement of copyrighted work,
accusing the companies of training image
generators on their work without consent.
A number of cases are ongoing and yet to
be resolved.
Lupo, the ArentFox Schiff attorney, said
based on existing case law, the test has
been whether the ultimate product is an
infringement. That could continue to
hold true, but AI is new territory and the
courts may need to offer more guidance.
McKinsey’s Roberts said brands should
involve their legal teams as they explore
opportunities and establish principles
and guidelines.
Arguably the blurriest area is the extent
to which brands can protect AI-generated
designs. Historically, IP laws have existed
in part to ensure creators can benefit from
the work they’ve put into a product or
innovation, according to Lupo. If it takes
just moments to create something, does it
deserve the same protection? The safest
route as the field continues to develop may
be for brands to use generated designs as
a starting point and then edit them or add
original material themselves, Lupo said.
7
Strategy

Example prompts and outputs from

Stable Diffusion’s DreamStudio

Prompt: “Black leather biker jacket”

Prompt: “Act like a fashion designer and

create a black leather biker jacket with an
asymmetrical collar, shoulder pads, distressed
detailing, narrow arms and extended length,
minimalist, geometric”

Prompt: “Black female model walking a

runway at Paris fashion week, white minidress
with colourblock details, Piet Mondrian,
chic, primary colours, white high heels, gold
earrings, asymmetrical”

Source: Stable Diffusion

businessoffashion.com 8
Strategy

02 — Visual Content

Opportunities
Enhance and support creativity

Augment and hyper-personalise

customer-facing content and services

Reduce costs or complexity of

ambitious projects

Automate manual tasks

Casablanca, which has typically opted to shoot its marketing images with film, used generative AI to expand its
creative boundaries for its Spring/Summer 2023 collection, partnering with photographer and artist Luke Nugent.
Casablanca.

Luxury fashion brand Casablanca entered
new territory in May 2023. Though
the Paris-based label has typically
avoided even digital photography for its
campaigns, preferring old-fashioned
film, it decided to use AI to produce the
campaign for its Spring/Summer 2023
collection, collaborating with Luke
Nugent, a British photographer and AI
artist. They opted for stylised shots that
were painterly and slightly surreal rather
than photorealistic.
Steve Grimes, Casablanca’s art director,
who along with junior art director
Sid Oudainia Beaulieu was part of the
creative team involved, said even being
AI-generated, the outcome was consistent
with the brand’s typical aesthetic and
imagery.
“We love the result,” stated Charaf
Tajer, Casablanca’s founder and creative
director.
Visual content has emerged as another
promising use of generative AI for fashion
brands, which are under ever-increasing
pressure to churn out imagery for
marketing, social media and e-commerce
sites. It has the potential to provide more
creative freedom and shorten production
timelines, since brands don’t necessarily
have to scout locations, find models,
style them (including hair and makeup),
manage lighting and do all the other work
that goes into creating images.
Whether or not it speeds the process
may depend on how it’s used, however. It
can also be difficult with current tools to
accurately translate a brand’s products in
a generated image. Worth noting as well
is that using AI can mean the models and
creatives brands would have normally
hired might not be necessary in some
instances.
But for companies with limited resources
trying to keep up with the content
demands of the internet, or just looking to
explore new creative avenues, it can be a
valuable tool.
“I would argue that’s the biggest challenge
in our business, that constant stream
of newness,” said Edzard van der Wyck,
co-founder of Sheep Inc., a high-end
knitwear brand that used AI for a
campaign that went live on its website
in May 2023. The brand can spend
large amounts of time and money on
photoshoots, which don’t always work as
well as hoped. With generative AI, Van

businessoffashion.com 9
Strategy
der Wyck said, Sheep Inc. can more easily
produce creative content that it can test
and iterate on based on what’s resonating
with its community.
There are sustainability benefits too,
according to Sheep Inc.’s other co-
founder, Michael Wessely, since AI
eliminates the need for carbon-intensive
flights and reduces waste, such as sets that
get discarded after use and the multiple
samples the brand has to produce for
shoots and can’t sell afterwards.
Levi’s is turning to AI to increase the
diversity of models displaying its clothes
on its e-commerce site, announcing plans
at BoF’s technology-focused Professional
Summit in March 2023 to test AI-
generated models created by the agency
Lalaland.ai.
But Levi’s also faced backlash,
underscoring the reputational risk of such
moves as fashion workers worry about
lost jobs. Even though Levi’s emphasised
it will continue to hire diverse human
Sheep Inc. created campaign images with generative AI, allowing it to do in a week what would normally take about
two months. Sheep Inc.
businessoffashion.com
models and is only using AI models to add
to its range, critics attacked the company,
accusing it of using AI to cut costs at the
expense of human models. In a statement,
Levi’s said it’s “physically impossible
to shoot every single product at every
single size at the SKU level” and noted the
technology could allow it to offer “a more
personal, relevant and potentially more
engaging shopping experience.”
Differing Results
The process used for creating imagery
has an influence on whether generative
AI proves more efficient. Sheep Inc. didn’t
enlist outside help and made everything
itself with Midjourney. Van der Wyck said
while it would typically require about two
months to plan and execute a campaign
shoot, it took about a week from start to
finish using AI.
But Casablanca, whose images were
much more elaborate, said it needed
about 10 people to create its AI campaign,
including a stylist, set designer and
lighting expert. With all the back-and-
forth refining the imagery, it ended
up taking longer than a traditional
photoshoot, according to Tajer.
“There’s so much work and different
people’s expertise that go into composing
those images and ideas to make
something finalised that looks to a certain
standard,” Grimes added. “It’s not just
pressing a button and spitting out an
image.”
Maybe the biggest challenge brands face
is ensuring their products are accurately
depicted in their AI-generated images,
since any product photos uploaded into
an image generator will be altered in the
output. Casablanca went so far as to shoot
products from its collection on models
mimicking the poses in the AI images and
then insert them into the AI images.
“We have to take lots of images of a
product — doesn’t have to be a studio
shoot at all — and then train the AI so
the AI learns that product exactly,” said
Nima Abbasi, a partner at Maison Meta,
which has created campaigns for a variety
of brands. “Then we pull that into the
creation so that the imagery actually
represents whatever the consumer is
going to buy.”
One common refrain heard among early
adopters is that while AI can enable
creativity, it isn’t a substitute for it. For
Casablanca, the process of researching
locations, building a story and mood-
boarding was exactly as it would have
been for a traditional shoot.
Both Casablanca and Sheep Inc. also said
AI won’t replace photography for them.
It’s simply another tool at their disposal.
Brands using AI to produce visual content
will want to consider whether to add
disclaimers on the imagery, particularly
with photorealistic images, to ensure
customers feel they are being transparent.
Maison Meta suggests they do so at this
stage.
They’ll also want to assess how they may
be repeating harmful biases in their
imagery, since AI replicates any biases
in the data it’s trained on, which in the
case of large language models generally
means huge volumes of data scraped
off the internet. In DreamStudio, a
commercial interface for Stable Diffusion,
for instance, the prompt “model wearing
a black sweater” resulted in images
depicting thin, white women and men.
Decode, a technology and culture site,
found that Midjourney can similarly
default to a white male for many prompts.
10
Strategy
03 — Writing Copy
When Snipes used generative-AI copywriting tools, its writers were able to spend more time on high-value products. Pexels.
Towards the end of 2022, Snipes began
Opportunities experimenting with generative-AI tools
such as Jasper and Copy.ai to see how they
Enhance and support creativity could help its copywriters. At any given
moment, there are thousands of products
Augment and hyper-personalise live on the sneaker and streetwear
customer-facing content and services retailer’s e-commerce site, with more
frequently arriving, putting pressure on
Reduce costs or complexity of
the writers to keep up their output. Chief
ambitious projects digital officer Jenna Flateman Posner was
apprehensive about how the copywriters
Automate manual tasks
would react. She braced herself when she
met with one writer to get feedback.
“It’s their craft. It’s their profession. So
you would think that utilising generative
AI would feel a little bit like cheating,”
Flateman Posner said. “What she told
me is that what the generative AI and the
dynamic copywriter have allowed her
to do is really home in on the styles that
bring value to the business.”
Now, for commodity products, the
copywriter acts more like an editor,
reviewing the technology’s output for
accuracy and Snipes’ tone of voice.
This frees the copywriter to focus
on the storytelling around styles
Snipes expects to be big sellers, have
marketing investments behind them
or have compelling backstories worth
highlighting, Flateman Posner said.
businessoffashion.com
Generative AI’s capacity for
understanding and producing natural-
sounding language makes writing one
of the tasks it’s especially well-suited to
handle. In addition to general-purpose
software like ChatGPT, start-ups
including Jasper and Hypotenuse offer
enterprise tools, while tech providers
powering many fashion businesses such
as Shopify, Salesforce and Amazon are
adding generative copy options into
their platforms. These tools aim to
help companies streamline writing of
everything from marketing emails to
product descriptions.
At this stage, however, they need human
oversight, and incorporating them can
require changing established workflows.
To make the most of their future
potential, including hyper-personalised
copy, companies will also require strong
data capabilities. For now, though, AI
copywriting tools can already automate
laborious work.
“We’re seeing a tonne of usage,” said
Miqdad Jaffer, head of product at Shopify,
which introduced a tool called Shopify
Magic for writing product descriptions in
early 2023. “It creates a way for [companies]
to get their products live faster and in the
hands of consumers sooner.”
11
Strategy
New tools from technology providers such as Salesforce can enable customers to automate some copywriting work like generating product descriptions. Salesforce.
For a new product, users of Shopify’s
service enter a few keywords as well as
any special instructions, like the name
of the manufacturer, and then generate a
description, which they can edit. Shopify
has also updated the product to allow for
different tones of voice, like an expert
tone or a playful tone.
Flateman Posner said tools like Hypotenuse,
which offers bulk writing and editing,
have helped with the workload tied to
dropshipping, since it can inundate
the copywriters with a large number
of products whose descriptions often
need rewriting. In one instance, Snipes’
copywriters completed about two weeks’
worth of writing in two hours, she said.
Tech providers say these capabilities
are just the beginning. Amazon, which
is rolling out generative-AI tools for its
cloud platform, Amazon Web Services,
envisions a time when a content
marketing manager could use its AI
service, Bedrock, to quickly generate
copy for social media posts, display ads
and websites by feeding it examples
of past taglines and relevant product
descriptions.
“It’s very feasible, if not now then in the
very near future,” said Justin Honaman,
head of worldwide retail and consumer
packaged goods at AWS. “Over time, I
think that the models will be even more
powerful and the use cases will continue
to expand.”
Salesforce introduced new generative
tools for Einstein GPT, its AI product
for customer relationship management,
in June 2023, including templates that
businessoffashion.com
let users create subject lines and body
copy for email campaigns based on what
has performed well in the past. Michael
Affronti, general manager of Salesforce’s
Commerce Cloud, foresees soon being
able to dynamically personalise product
descriptions for individual users.
If a customer in New York visits a site,
for example, the copy describing a jacket
might take a fashion angle, but if they’re
in Seattle, where it rains frequently, it
could emphasise its waterproofing. An
image of a model wearing the product
could also dynamically change to show a
cityscape or a forest. (Snipes, a Salesforce
customer, is eager to begin testing
these sorts of personalised experiences,
Flateman Posner said.)
“Brands and I have been talking
about generative [AI] as a way to bring
personalisation even closer to the
customer, because we can fundamentally
do things that were impossible unless you
had a million content writers writing a
million versions of a product description,”
Affronti said.
One-to-One Barriers
But to tailor content to consumers at a
one-to-one level, brands and retailers will
need more than just publicly available
information. They’ll have to connect their
customer data to the AI model. That will
prove challenging for many businesses,
especially those struggling to collect
first-party data or structure it to be
usable. Companies will also want to make
sure the AI provider has data-privacy
measures in place.
Honaman noted the excitement around
generative AI has led interest in AWS
to surge as companies worry their data
capabilities could hold them back.
Workflows might need adjusting too.
Affronti said instead of a writer creating
several versions of a product description
for the company’s major markets, they
could set up a generative interface that
allows them to write one or two versions
and deploy them.
“They review it once, change maybe one
word and hit save,” he said.
One point of tension for any company
involves deciding how much human
oversight is needed and how much
autonomy to give the AI. While large
language models can be good at producing
conversational text, they can also
make factual and conceptual errors or
reproduce information from sources
closely enough to raise plagiarism
concerns. The wrong error directed at
a customer could lose a sale or, worse,
damage the retailer’s reputation. If a
company wants a person to review all
copy before it’s live, that would slow the
workflow and could eliminate the opportunity
to let AI personalise copy on the fly.
Brands could mitigate these problems in
various ways, like having templates that
the AI just fills in with certain keywords.
AI models are continuously improving, too.
Even so, there’s always some inherent error
rate in them. Brands will need to decide how
much human monitoring and intervention
they’ll need to mitigate that risk.
12
Strategy

04 — Shopping and Customer Service

With AI, chatbots such as Zalando’s can be genuinely conversational, rather than just offering a set of scripted responses, and provide tailored product suggestions. Zalando.

In customer interviews, Tian provide tailored product suggestions

Opportunities Su, Zalando’s vice president of rather than a generic list of links, like
personalisation and recommendation, conventional search. Importantly, they
Enhance and support creativity said she often hears that customers create an iterative experience in which
struggle to find the products they’re a shopper can respond to the results
Augment and hyper-personalise
looking for because they don’t know with feedback or additional questions,
customer-facing content and services the right search terms. A chatbot that narrowing the results or guiding the bot
Reduce costs or complexity of
can understand and respond to natural towards what they want.
language could greatly improve the
ambitious projects But while these bots understand and
situation in Su’s opinion, which is why the
respond to questions effectively, even
Automate manual tasks online fashion retailer is joining other
providing viable outfit suggestions, they
companies — such as Shopify, secondhand
have limitations. BoF testing in spring
marketplace Mercari, start-up ShopWith
2023 found their replies can sound
AI and KNXT, an experimental platform
automated and they may fail to surface
operated by Kering — in releasing an
satisfactory products. (The retailer’s
online shopping assistant that uses
inventory is a limiting factor.) Their
generative AI.
styling sense tends towards fairly generic
With these chatbots, searching for a suggestions as well. The expectation,
“summer top” might return a set of linen however, is that as they advance they’ll
shirts, even though the customer didn’t offer shoppers a new and effective way to
specify linen. They can also recommend search for and discover products.
full looks that consider contextual factors,
“The natural language interface allows
such as the type of event, location and
them to be able to be expressive in
weather if a customer asks what to wear to
whatever way they want and allows us to
an open-air concert in London in October.
determine what the right search criteria
Shopping and customer service are other is,” Shopify’s Jaffer said.
areas where the technology’s language
The interface is perhaps especially
abilities can play a role. Chatbots
useful for platforms and retailers like
bolstered by large language models can be
Shopify, Zalando and Mercari with a vast
genuinely conversational, unlike previous
inventory of thousands of products. For
generations that could only reply from a
shoppers, finding the right item can be
set of scripted responses. They can also

businessoffashion.com 13
 Strategy
“Human ‘augmentation,’ a challenge, particularly if they aren’t
familiar with all the brands available. The
versus ‘automation,’ will bot can offer a variety of options that fit
their search criteria.
be the watchword in A site with a limited assortment can be
luxury.” simpler to browse, and there are fewer
options for the bot to draw from when the
— Roger Roberts shopper asks a question. Because KNXT
only carries Kering brands and those in
which the holding company of the Pinault
family behind Kering owns a stake, for
example, its Madeline bot doesn’t offer
a wide range of items when asked for
recommendations. It suggests only one
product.
On the other hand, luxury shoppers may
value the additional information and
storytelling Madeline offers, such as
product details and occasions when an
item could be worn.
McKinsey’s Roberts believes generative
AI could enhance the in-store luxury
experience, too, giving sales associates
“superpowers” through clienteling tools
that analyse client data, translate the
insights into plain language and generate
recommended actions.
“Human ‘augmentation,’ versus
‘automation,’ will be the watchword in
luxury,” he said. “It will continue to be
super important for those frontline team
members to think critically about the
recommendations here.”
Not a Replacement For Search — Yet
Jaffer pointed out that Shopify’s intent
isn’t to replace traditional search
with a generative-AI assistant but
to complement it. He compared it to
shopping in a store. Some customers know
exactly what they’re looking for and don’t
need the help of a sales associate. Others
have questions or want suggestions and
would like to speak with someone who
can guide them. (Google has announced
it is testing generative AI in its Shopping
vertical, and while it won’t have a
conversational bot, it similarly aims to
offer more guidance with new features.)
Building a generative-AI chatbot isn’t as
simple as getting an API for ChatGPT.
Large language models, which are trained
on general information, aren’t fashion
specialists, and they can be vulnerable
to “hallucination,” meaning replies that
may be grammatically correct but are not
factual — or are just plain odd. Users have
found ways to get around protocols like
blocks on inappropriate content by asking
bots to act as a different persona.
“These AI [tools] are designed to hold a
good conversation. You have to actually
[specially train] it to give you more factual
information,” Su said.
Moreover, the AI just helps to understand
businessoffashion.com
what the customer wants. The retailer
must then be able to find products
that match. To do that, it needs a deep
understanding of its inventory, meaning
each product needs rich information and
the retailer has to extract and interpret
that information, according to Su.
Jaffer similarly pointed out that Shopify
wants to improve the quality of the
datasets it uses to suggest products to
make it easier for customers to filter by
price or certain product attributes.
A larger goal for many fashion players
is being able to use customer data to
personalise a chatbot’s responses. The bot
could use the data to offer specific sizes
based on a customer’s preferences, for
example. It’s an ambitious aim, though,
and requires brands and retailers to have
their customer data at hand and to be able
to map it to their inventory.
“Getting to know the buyer information
and then tying that to the merchant
attribute information is one where we’re
going to have to spend a little more time
for sure,” Jaffer said.
Essentially, chat assistants are largely a
work in progress or still in testing. Jaffer
said Shopify opened Shop.ai to users
quickly to see how customers interact
with it and gather feedback. Kering said in
a statement that KNXT, which introduced
its Madeline chatbot in March, is a place
to “test innovative digital experiences.”
Zalando’s shopping assistant was in beta
testing as of the time of writing.
But all these companies expressed
confidence that the language abilities of
generative AI will keep advancing and
that their shopping assistants would
steadily improve in tandem as they
receive more data and user feedback.
Companies interested in exploring
generative-AI chatbots will need to be
clear about their customers’ needs and
whether a bot can meet them. They
should also consider whether they want
to launch quickly to see how customers
interact with the bot or whether it’s better
to test privately to decide if the bot needs
refining first.
14
Takeaways
Putting AI Into Practice
Fashion and Generative AI:
A Starter Checklist
Like with other tech rollouts, this checklist can
help brands launching gen AI do so smoothly.
Begin small with tools that are free
or low cost
Closely examine specific needs and
use cases
Factor in the impact on workforces
and workflows
Ensure human input and oversight
is available
Have appropriate guard rails for
customer-facing tools
Test rigorously before deployment
businessoffashion.com
For many fashion businesses, it is
relatively easy to start testing ways to
put the technology to use with tools that
are free or low cost, such as many of the
image generators available, or enterprise
tools for tasks such as copywriting. In
some cases, they can enlist partners like
creative agencies or artists with technical
expertise.
But before they make any major or costly
commitments, closely examining specific
needs is critical, as well as evaluating
how much value generative AI can offer
and what the impact will be on their
workforce and workflows.
“You need to have a broader aperture and
not only think gen AI, but you really need
to come from a values point of view and
understand your business, understand
the evolution of your business and where
you’d like to drive it and understand
the full value chain,” said McKinsey’s
Harreis. “Once you understand the
opportunities, you would start thinking
about what’s the best approach to it that
gives the highest return on investment.”
Businesses should keep in mind that the
technology can help speed up processes
and reduce manual work, but it requires
human input and oversight. Designs
often need manual editing and could
prove difficult to manufacture in some
instances. Visual content remains
dependent on creative ideas and refining.
Copy needs editing and checking for
accuracy. And chatbots require plenty of
human effort behind the scenes.
Roberts of McKinsey pointed out that
generative AI at this stage should be
regarded as a way to enhance human
abilities rather than replace them,
particularly when it comes to luxury,
which remains rooted in personal
customer service. To make the most of
the technology, sales associates and other
staff may need to be trained in the best
ways to use AI applications.
The brands and retailers providing
input for this case study also commonly
emphasised that generative AI provides
another tool they can use and isn’t a
substitute for what they already have.
It might find a role in addition to, rather
than instead of, photography, for example.
Similarly, it can help designers produce
new ideas but won’t eliminate sketching.
At least for now, it’s being used to
supplement or support established tools
and processes.
The most ambitious uses of generative
AI could also require bigger shifts, like
in the case of personalised content or
chat responses based on customer data.
Before companies can put AI to use for
those purposes, they need good data
that’s structured and accessible to the
employees who need it. Many companies
may find they have to upgrade their data
capabilities first.
“If you cannot get access to your data, it’s
going to hold you back,” said Amazon’s
Honaman. “How can you run models
against it?”
None of the experts BoF spoke with
suggested companies avoid generative
AI because of any of the potential risks,
but there are issues to be aware of. For
text-based applications, particularly
those where the AI is interacting directly
with customers, companies should put in
place appropriate guard rails to constrain
bot responses to customers’ queries.
Open-ended bots can be led into making
confusing or worrying statements,
creating potential reputational risks for a
business.
With generative AI for design, the
technology could introduce new legal
questions around IP as well. The safest
route may be for brands to ensure they’re
adding their own elements to generated
designs.
“The most practical approach is just
keeping humans armed with critical
thinking [and] in the loop on most aspects
of deployment and adoption today,”
Roberts said.
Ultimately, companies should treat it as
any other new technology: Think of the
use cases that make the most sense for
the business, weigh the benefits and costs,
test before deploying widely and measure
results.
15
Looking Ahead
Generative AI’s
Fast-Changing Future
The progress happening in generative
AI is swift and is making a meaningful
difference in the tools fashion businesses
can use. OpenAI’s GPT-4 is leaps ahead
of its predecessor, GPT-3.5 — the model
underlying ChatGPT — surpassing it in
advanced reasoning, accuracy and more.
Sheep Inc.’s Van der Wyck said the release
of version five of Midjourney in March
2023 marked the first time he felt the
technology could produce usable visuals.
“Version six is on the horizon. I’m already
excited about what probably is going to
come next because it is already so good,”
he said.
The abilities are only growing. In a
spring 2023 paper, computer scientists
at Microsoft said an AI system seemed to
show an intuitive understanding of the
physical world, solving a puzzle about how
to stack different objects, despite having
no physical embodiment itself.
Exhibit 6: Growth Mindset
By 2026, the total market for generative AI is expected to more than double, with natural
language interfaces powering uses like customer service and sales.
AI market size in generative-relevant categories (est.)
USD (billions)
Natural language interfaces
Tailored applications (e.g. biotech, coding)
Foundational AI software
2D/3D media and audio
0.77
9.40
12.76
20.00
2023
Source: Pitchbook Emerging Tech Research
businessoffashion.com
The expectation is that these advances
will continue making AI tools more
effective and valuable to fashion. They
could also unlock capabilities companies
haven’t yet imagined. Honaman said the
use cases Amazon is working on have
evolved over the course of just a few weeks
— and most people weren’t thinking about
them at all several months previously.
And while one obstacle to progress is the
expense of training AI models, which
can require hefty investments due to the
processing power and hardware required,
costs are falling.
The way Affronti at Salesforce put it is
that “as the technology itself gets better,
as some of the work that we’re doing
in Einstein GPT gets more powerful
and, quite frankly, as the underlying
cost comes down for actually running
all of this infrastructure — because
it’s so expensive from a computation
perspective — I expect to see more
1.99
22.08
28.46
46.01
2026 E
and more of those scenarios happen
that involve doing things on behalf of a
customer faster and more cheaply.”
These conditions make it hard to predict
what the future holds. One warning from
experts is that as AI-generated content
proliferates and becomes the input new
models are trained on, the output will
decline in quality, like making a copy of
a copy. But it is increasingly likely that
generative AI will become embedded in
fashion over time, just as earlier uses for
machine learning have. Large tech players
and start-ups alike will also keep trying to
capitalise on the technology with services
and tools for businesses. Pitchbook
estimates the market for enterprise
applications of generative AI will reach
$42.9 billion in 2023 and grow to $98.5
billion by 2026. Within that, it expects
natural language interfaces to make up
the largest portion because of “customer
service and sales automation use cases.”
It’s still a big question whether generative
AI will live up to the potential its
proponents envision. In fashion, it could
find a home in some narrow roles, appear
in customer feeds or on e-commerce
sites every so often in ways they may or
may not recognise and be absorbed into
the industry’s infrastructure without
changing it.
But if it does match the expectations
being put forward by many, it could
reshape how fashion businesses operate,
and by extension have major effects on
the industry’s workforce. Historically,
technology hasn’t resulted in a net loss of
jobs but it has changed work. As some jobs
are eliminated, new roles can be created,
requiring different training and abilities.
Revolve’s Mente pointed out that AI could
accelerate the move to digital tools, like
3D design programs.
“It’ll definitely shift skill sets,” he said.
Fashion companies will need to be
prepared for change, whatever form it
ultimately takes.
16
Glossary
• Artificial intelligence (AI): Technology • Neural network: A form of ML that
such as a computer program that uses a set of interconnected algorithms
mimics the human brain’s ability to structured in various node layers
perform tasks and learn and improve imitating the workings of the human
over time. brain.
• Deep learning: A form of neural • Transformer: A neural network that
network involving more than three uses sequences of data, like words in
node layers. These algorithms are a sentence, to identify relationships
more effective at processing and between data points that may be far
understanding unstructured data. apart from one another, allowing it to
understand context and predict new
• Diffusion model: A type of generative
sequences. Many language models like
model trained by adding “noise” to a set
OpenAI’s GPT models (GPT stands for
of training data and then reversing the
“generative pre-trained transformer”)
process to reconstruct the data. It can
are transformers trained on giant
use random noise to create new data by
amounts of data.
repeating the “denoising” process.
• Generative Adversarial Network
(GAN): A type of generative model
capable of producing realistic imagery
by employing two neural networks,
a generator and a discriminator. The
generator creates new content and
the discriminator tries to distinguish
if it’s real or fake. As each improves,
the output becomes increasingly more
difficult to identify as false.
• Generative AI: Deep learning
algorithms that with sufficient examples
of something can recognise the
underlying patterns and structures in
the data and produce new iterations,
including text, imagery, video and more.
• Machine learning (ML): A branch of AI
that involves algorithms which are able
to identify patterns in data and learn
from them without being explicitly
programmed.

businessoffashion.com 17
Further Reading
• UBS, US Retail & Internet: highlights from an expert call on Generative AI
• The Business of Fashion, How Generative AI Could Perpetuate Fashion’s Biases
• The Business of Fashion, Should Fashion Fear AI?
• McKinsey & Company, Generative AI: Unlocking the future of fashion
• The Business of Fashion, The BoF Podcast | How Generative AI Could Reshape Fashion
• Stephen Wolfram, What Is ChatGPT Doing…and Why Does It Work?
• Quartz, The data that transformed AI research—and possibly the world

businessoffashion.com 18
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Associate Director, Brand and Community
jael.fowakes@businessoffashion.com

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Senior Account Director, Camron Global
liam.johnson@camronglobal.com

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