The Algorithm Wears Prada:

Luxury products and experiences often value themselves on the degree of human creativity and human time that they encapsulate into something small and intuitive: complexity embedded in simplicity.

That could mean a humble concierge who can conjure up the answer to any request at the drop of a hat. Or a piece of clothing whose cut speaks to a world of complex cultural influence. Or seamless, frictionless product architecture optimised by countless hours of work.

But today, genAI is exponentially increasing its ability to mimic the fruits of human labour and creativity. Holding an amount of knowledge almost unfathomable to humans, LLM’s provide answers, ideas and creative offers in seconds. And LLMs’ digital ‘man-hours’ come for free, or almost free.

This new standard for complexity contained within simplicity will reshape our ideas of luxury in future years.

When futuristic tech doesn’t = excitement

 As they did for NFTs and then metaverse offers, luxury brands are showcasing AI experiments to signal their fluency in tomorrow’s culture and its technologies. Jacquemus released a video showing bus-sized bags on a Paris street; Valentino added an AI production house to the experimental artist line-up showcased in its Valenino Garavani DeVain Digital Creative Project.

 But these uses of genAI are receiving significant pushback from consumers and taste-makers. And that’s because futuristic cutting-edge technologies are no longer necessarily aspiratonal.

 The tech industry excitement around NFTs or the metaverse never translated into actual aspirationality. And consumer enthusiasm around AI is so low that Apple is avoiding using the word (it prefers ‘intelligence’) and premiumising its offers by restricting AI in new products (to local, on-device processing), rather than adding it. Unlike the metaverse, AI is already ubiquioutous in the lives of many people and the operations of many businesses. Already, it holds many cultural meanings beside ‘modernity.’ And one of those meanings is ‘low-effort’ – creative production which is complex, but that doesn’t contain the value of human labour.

Cultural meaning of AI: effortlessness

In February, Demna’s first Gucci show prompted two-pronged accusations of low effort. The garments were described by some as overly simple, lacking evidence of deep artistic thought. And the show was promoted with AI images, complete with the classic genAI flaws of over-saturation, neglect of detail, and over-perfection.

 Always provocative, Demna mentioned asking AI to predict what his show would be like (it expected bomber jackets, apparently). We’ve got no way of knowing the role it might or might not play in his creative process. But brands including Collina Strada and and Norma Kamali have already experimented with feeding their archives into AI systems to create new pieces. It’s hard to imagine a similar comment being made during the short reign of Demna’s predecessor, technical expert Sabato Sarno, whose communications focussed on his humanness and authenticity.

 It’s too soon to tell if Demna’s leadership will reverse the fall in Gucci’s fortunes. The genAI promotion strengthened his maverick reputation, and possibly that of Gucci. But it also threatens luxury positioning by removing the crucial value of known man-hours from the new collection’s storytelling - and perhaps even from the clothes.

AI’s threat to luxury: effortless prediction and pastiche

 Use of genAI for creative production that would otherwise be done by humans is unlikely to ever feel luxurious. (At most, it may become standard practice rather than a negative). Instead, AI’s capacity for prediction and pastiche may lead to an even narrower gap between luxury and high street offers.

Fashion houses base their identities as creative leaders on decades of technical knowledge, and on the huge amount of cultural intelligence that their designers absorb. But if Gucci can its feed their archives into LLMs, so can Zara or Primark. How cheap and easy might it be to produce a line ‘in the style of’ Demna’s Gucci, with the appropriate heritage references? Do Louis Vuitton’s Murakami and Kusama collab feel as engaging and aspirational as it did before video and visuals ‘in the style of Yayoi Kusama’ were instantly available via LLMs?

 It’s too soon to tell. But it’s easy to imagine a new generation, used to brainstorming their own cultural influences with LLM and getting creative solutions back, shrugging at a designer’s moodboard.

Leveraging AI: AI effortlessness as luxury ‘magic’

 As stated, use of AI requires intentionality in order to signal a meaning beyond ‘up-to-date’ or ‘future-facing.’ Brands should think carefully about ways to position AI’s endless knowledgeability as a luxury-enabler, rather than a democratiser. That means uses of AI which add geniune value, and which only luxury brands are able to conceive and pull of.

-  Remove effort from consumers, not workers. While low effort from of workers or creators will always feel anti-luxury, low effort on the part of consumers is still aspirational. Help consumers to do things they wouldn’t be able to do – as when Tommy Hilfiger offered AI as a co-creation method for consumers to design clothes in the brand’s style.

-   Partner effortless AI service with human creativity. While still a very niche product, there’s evidence that Ray-Ban x Meta AI-enabled glasses are selling more quickly and successfully than Google Glass ever did. Meta’s choice to partner with Ray-Ban – and soon, with Oakley – could be the defining difference. While Meta’s AI requires zero human effort to operate, Ray-Ban needed human expertise to create frames that could look good while also containing bulky hardware.

-   Use AI for otherwise impossible tasks. Artist Takashi Murakami is currently showing, in London’s Gagosian gallery, a ground-breaking ‘partnership’ with 17th century artist Iwasa Matabei. He used genAI’s skills at pattern recognition to ‘repair’ scarring and missing paint, creating a likely replica of a damaged heritage object. Could brands use genAI to replicate lost heritage designs, or use its encyclopedic knowledge of materials to offer repairs that might have previously been impossible?

Differentiation against AI: beyond cultural complexity

 Human creativity and time still hold value. In fact, they’re set to rise in importance as mainstream and premium offers switch to AI. But cultural complexity may not be the best way to signal that valuable human effort in a luxury product or experience.

 Instead, brands could offer deeply personal service, access to specific heroes, and curation of physical spaces where humans can meet.

 -  Friendship-level service. Aman Resorts is known for its hospitality philosophy. Rather than following rigid etiquette or a set range of offers, staff behave as if they’re welcoming guests into their own homes. Service is personal, informal and anticipatory, with detailed, memorised knowledge on guest preferences replicating a friend’s knowledge. This type of deeply human service is likely to increase in importance as a luxury signifier. After all, an AI chatbot can replicate a service script, but not a genuine smile.

-  Unique humans. This year, Aman’s wellness programs are led by tennis legends Maria Sharapova and Novak Djokovic. It’s possible that professional wellness  experts – or an LLM – might have devises a wellness program with more rigorous scientific backing. But the tennis legends feel luxurious because they are exclusive: there’s only one real Shaparova, only one Djokovic.

-  Human interaction as the offer. Aman’s spin-off brand for younger audiences, Janu, opposes itself to Aman’s reputation for privacy and seclusion by positioning around ‘social wellness.’ That means the benefits – tangible and intangible - that come from socialising with a select group of other humans. Janu translates to ‘soul’ in Sanskrit, proving Aman’s appreciation ofthe one ‘wellness’ element that AI can’t provide.

In summary, to retain their aspirationality as AI rises in ubiquity and power, brands will have to:

-   understand the cultural meanings that consumers will glean from their use of AI

-   understand the potential effects on luxury of AI’s usurping of human-style complexity

-   leverage the aspirational cultural meanings of AI by using it in the right way and in the right places

-   differentiate themselves positively against the anti-luxury meanings of AI

Above, we’ve outlined some ways that brands are achieving those goals today and in the near future. But longer-term, genAI’s ability to replicate human creativity and labour is likely to disturb the essential luxury promise of complexity embedded in simplicity.

 For now, assertion that the complexity on offer did in fact come from human experts is working for many luxury brands. But a new generation are growing up not only with the ability to search all the world’s knowledge and creative inspiration, but with free and flexible curators of that inspiration always on hand.

To future-proof, brands will need to rethink the true meaning of ‘human value’ - and find new ways to present it.