“Fashion is one of the places where cultural changes show up first.” That was tech millionaire and longevity obsessive Bryan Johnson weighing in on X two days after making his runway debut in Paris at Matières Fécales last week.
Johnson’s appearance on the catwalk was the last in a string of physical appearances by tech figures at this season’s runway shows. If he’s right, Fall/Winter 2026 showed just how much tech is crashing into the cultural conversation — and using fashion as its conduit — as investors pour unprecedented sums of money into entrepreneurs’ promises of an AI-optimized future.
Not only did this spur a conversation around the new power dynamic in society, where luxury brands struggling with the slowdown court the newfound billions of tech’s megarich, but it cemented tech at the center of online discourse, with AI at its fore. What’s clear now is that we’re entering an age where designers are grappling with what technology and AI’s influence on creativity is.
Speaking to designers backstage this fashion month, it became clear that three schools of thought have emerged: some brands are using AI as an actual creative partner; some are using the tech widely, but for operational applications; while others are intentionally flouting the tech in favor of untouched human creativity.
A behind-the-scenes helper
Emerging designers were by far the cohort most willing to experiment with — and talk about — AI this season, with many resource-strapped teams turning to the tech in order to do more with less. The majority described AI as a “tool” to help them with more menial, behind-the-scenes tasks, with applications that ranged from drafting contracts, to mood boarding, mock-ups, and show asset generation.
For Yaku Stapleton, who held a show-like presentation at London’s NewGen Space in 180 Strand in February, AI has become an indispensable tool for operational and creative applications alike. In the first instance, Stapleton’s team uses AI at the idea and concepting stages of design, to communicate better visually. “When you’re coming up with all kinds of ideas and potential solutions, being able to get it out of your head and into a physical form with AI means that you’re discussing something that’s real, something that you’re all looking at, and it becomes objective rather than subjective,” he says. “It means the initial ideation phase can often be optimized better.”
“It can really speed things up at the mock-up stage, too,” the designer continues. “For example, with a T-shirt print, you can be like: I like this aspect of this image you’ve generated, and I don’t like this one, so can we use that as a reference? And from there, you can save a team member’s time and allow them to spend more on getting the final print done, which they can use a variety of tools to do.”
Stapleton says that AI is still very much just one tool among others in the process — for example, if his team wants to visualize something in 3D, they will start off by making collages in the traditional way, before feeding that into the Meshi AI program and making it 3D. He also uses it to help him manage the operational side of the business, like navigating IP law.
“Imagine if a few years ago, a designer said they wouldn’t use digital tools like Adobe in graphic design? I don’t think that company would be around now,” he muses. “I understand why people are scared of new tools, as it’s easy to see them as something that replaces emotion. But as someone running a business, I’d feel silly ignoring these tools. Business is a place where emotion is less involved. If you’re slow or spending all your resources on time that could be saved, it’s just not smart.”
In Copenhagen, Paolina Russo’s co-designers, Paolina Russo and Lucile Guilmard, also said they use AI a lot on the operational side, while creatively, they’ve been experimenting with the technology in certain categories to produce a handmade look at scale. “Let’s say for example denim, each time we try a new material, that’s when the technology comes in,” Guilmard says. “When we did denim for our first show in Copenhagen, we went to a factory, tried all their machines, and came up with techniques that are both handwoven and made with their machines that we trained.”
“The core of the brand is really knitwear,” Russo says. “That’s how we started. So while at first glance, the type of knitwear we do always looks really handmade or knitted by your grandmother, and we’re very nostalgic with the wool and cotton fibers we use, it’s actually all 100% programmed on digital knitting machines. We’ve been total nerds on how you can transfer the human hand and even create little things that feel like mistakes into a program, and have always been so interested in that fusion between tech and craft.”
Back in London’s NewGen space, Marie Lueder’s FW26 collectsion was titled Ghosts of My Life, full of juxtapositions between bright flashing lights and dark garments, as well as a focus on craftsmanship that ran in tandem with the designer’s explorations of AI.
“I think my main job is to communicate, so I use AI a lot for that,” Lueder said backstage. “It’s helpful to explain something where you have to quickly communicate a visual process and you don’t have the time to make it. But then it’s never enough, so I think it’s a question of AI plus human voice.”
One of the most distinctive parts of Lueder’s show was a sculptural turbine installation that formed the centerpoint of the set. Lueder used Adobe AI to help her visualize her mental references to the past, to create a mock-up of the turbine. She also began experimenting with AI to create novel images, using it to create the show invites and the tarot-style placecards positioned on guests’ seats.
“It was based on an image that we shot at our pre-lookbook shoot. And it took a lot of time and four people to create it exactly how we wanted,” Lueder says. “It was a really interesting process, and reflects how I really feel about it. There was a very senior graphic designer, a very senior 3D designer, me, and the person who was prompting the AI, to really make it look how we wanted. But it wasn’t faster or easier, I’d say, which was a huge learning for me and I wanted to challenge that. So I think it’s a process, I can’t give a perfect answer yet, but I’m trying to challenge my aesthetic training and teaching, and find the ways that I like to use it.”
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After teasing his debut Gucci collectsion with a series of AI-generated images resembling a mood board on the brand’s Instagram account in the days leading up to the show, Demna also said he viewed the technology as a tool to communicate visually. “I think this is 2026. I’m using things as a tool,” he told CNN backstage. “If I can use it to do something that gives me a quick idea or a visualization of something, why shouldn’t I do it? It’s like, in 2008 retailers were refusing e-commerce because it was not quality. I find it ridiculous.”
A designer in itself
Last week in Paris, Paul Billot’s hotly anticipated debut for his eponymous label represented the boldest experiment with AI this fashion month, in an off-schedule show for a collectsion he designed entirely with AI. After working at Maison Margiela’s Artisanal line under John Galliano, Billot has been experimenting with the tech as an equal creative partner. He designed his debut collectsion, titled Ailleurs, by feeding his favorite poem, Alphabet by Henri Michaux, into a Quantum AI model he co-designed with an engineer. Quantum AI is a nascent form of the technology that goes beyond generative AI’s mimicking of existing inputs, to generate entirely new concepts and outputs (often termed “quantum noise”) in what Billot sees as “an extension of my own creativity”.
Billot spent his MA thesis highlighting AI’s shortcomings when it comes to understanding fabrics and the weight of garments, before beginning to exploit exactly that in his own design process. “After a few weeks, I thought, maybe there’s a way that the naivety of the software can be an opportunity to create newness or unknown shapes in fashion,” he says. “Most of the AI models like Midjourney, the industry’s favorite Awen, ChatGPT, or Nanobanana are what I call parrots, because they try to reproduce human thinking. But I’m more interested in developing entirely new ways of thinking from AI software.”
After inputting the poem into the quantum AI and asking for garment designs, Billot says the results were so abstract they were “immaterial”. “In the beginning, I had almost no idea of what the images were, or what I could do with them. But then I highlighted three aspects. One was their blur, with deep colors and gradients, the second was this sort of halo effect of several horizontal lines, and the third was these bubbles of light it produced, with a heart of black, which were almost like stars.”
Billot took these outputs as designs, which he then tried to recreate through material garments — effectively turning the most common AI-assisted design process on its head, so that the AI becomes the designer and the human handles its execution.
“I don’t think AI is just a tool. I think you can use it as a tool, but I think it’s a waste of energy and almost an unsustainable way of using AI,” Billot says. “But I also don’t like to say that it’s a design partner, because that would mean that it would be almost like a person, and there’s something uncanny about it, and I have nothing uncanny when I work with AI.”
“Instead, I like to say that it is a material, because it has some constraints and properties to embrace,” he adds. “If we start to erase those properties, then I see no reason why we should work with AI.”
At odds with human creativity
At the opposite end of the spectrum to Billot, several designers believe that in the age of AI, human creativity should be fiercely protected, and that all creative endeavors should remain untouched by the tech.
After her London show in February, Greek designer Dimitra Petsa of Di Petsa said she thinks AI is a tool the industry should be very careful with.
“I think it’s interesting that we always see technology advance faster than the ethical debate surrounding it,” Petsa said. “Aesthetic and creativity is something very deeply human, and I personally think that AI will never be able to feel when a design is relevant, how it sits in fashion history, and how it reads from an aesthetic philosophy point of view; these are all too complex and human and abstract I feel.”
While she acknowledged that AI “isn’t going anywhere” and can potentially aid more operational parts of a creative business, Petsa predicted that consumers will lean more and more to the tactile and tangible in the age of AI.
“I think AI has created a deeper insecurity with what’s real and what’s not, which I think is good to make people question the content they consume,” the designer said. “Perhaps this will create a desire for the things we know are real, that we can physically touch.”
Backstage at Prada in Milan, co-designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons echoed this sentiment. “As designers, we have to work instinctively from the heart, from the mind, from feeling, from our knowledge, from our respect for history and our interest in the future,” said Simons. “But once we have brought something out, it is clearly coming from our heart and our mind [unlike AI], and then it’s up to the audience.”
Meanwhile, Mrs. Prada emphasized the same need for an intentional approach. “We might be having a different conversation in two years about AI and fashion, and where it’s going and who will harness it and how people will use it,” she said. “But it’s already 100% there. So again, artificial intelligence is here, but it’s up to us and governments and other organizations to control it.”
“I’m always saying I’m happy to be taken by surprise, and I always give the benefit of the doubt. So if something that is purely AI is bringing me a show that I’m completely blown away by, then I’ll change my mind about it,” Simons added. “I think maybe that’s the big danger to the profession.”
