If any of you need a gift for someone you don’t like, allow me to draw your attention to ChatGPT’s latest merch.

ChatGPT has a clothing line called Supply Co. that, the site says, “documents the visual culture surrounding intelligent systems.”

The $70 basketball is already sold out. The $40 distressed Codex T-shirt is only available in XS and S. The $175 Research half-zip, however, “feature[ing] a crisp collar that reminisces on our days in academia” is still available in most sizes. 

The reaction to this drop, if we are calling it that, has been disgust bordering on numbness. There’s something very 2026 (negative association) about a company with an $852 billion valuation selling old money aesthetic — in the two-dimensional, algorithmically flattened, most TikTok sense of the definition — half-zips promising to make you look “effortlessly fitted.” For $175.

“The irony of this embarrassing attempt to make artificial intelligence cool is that the public already finds AI fascinating,” wrote Sean Monahan in 8ball. “Attempts to make this technology ‘fashionable’ misread the room.”

But this is exactly what we’ve been seeing from tech generally — and what this year’s Tech Gala really brought into mainstream discourse.

Tech has never been this desperate to appear tasteful.

Meta’s latest AI glasses are fronted by Kylie Jenner, whom Mark Zuckerberg called a “fashion icon.” (The activist group Everyone Hates Elon that trolled Bezos when he was in NYC for the Tech Gala is doing the same with the Meta glasses.) San Francisco welcomed Anna Wintour to potentially throw a Vogue World there (though I hear it won’t be the next one, but maybe the following). And OpenAI has been throwing money at her Met Gala for years now.

I struggle to qualify each industry in this relationship as anything other than painfully transparent. Luxury fashion is in a downturn and needs customers. Tech is more despised than not and needs cultural cachet. Yet the melding of the two industries seems to have the primary effect of degrading both. Consumers will never buy that the AI industry, which aims to replace taste with tech, has taste. Nor will they buy that fashion, which does have taste, thinks that tech people are tasteful. It all amounts to one big, tasteless ruse. 

“Not Putting on Your Shoes Is a Mistake” (A Phia Update)

Last week I wrote about the latest scandal facing Phia, the shopping app and browser extension founded by Phoebe Gates and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni that promises to help users find the lowest prices on fashion items along with resale alternatives. Since publishing the story, I spoke to Ben Edelman, the affiliate marketing expert and lawyer who previously taught at Harvard Business School and worked as the chief economist for web experiences, strategy, and policy at Microsoft for many years. Edelman may have been the first person to uncover that Phia was taking credit for sales it did not drive, and helped Bloomberg with its story breaking the news.

Edelman helpfully clarified a few points, and I wanted to share his comments (for those interested in even more technical detail, check out the article he published on his site).

First, he alleged that Phia was doing two things it shouldn’t have. (Though the term “cookie stuffing” has been widely used, he prefers other terminology.) The first violation he identified is “forced clicks” — generally considered the more serious allegation — where Phia waited for a user to show intent to purchase an item (say, by putting it in a cart) and then the iOS Safari extension would “automatically invoke their affiliate link and thereby position themselves [Phia] to get paid a commission,” Edelman explained. The effect was that merchants were paying Phia for nothing, since this occurred whether a user had engaged with Phia's recommendations or not.  

“In a forced clicks violation, there's only one affiliate in the story. The affiliate is Phia. And the question is whether the merchant should get to keep a hundred cents on the dollar versus whether the merchant should have to pay commission,” he said.

Second, he found Phia violated “stand-down” rules. Let's say you found a black dress on Wirecutter and went to buy it — Phia was overriding Wirecutter’s affiliate code with its own. Stand-down rules (which are written into contracts) state that the first affiliate referrer should get the commission. In the case of Wirecutter or a news outlet, Phia getting commission takes money that the New York Times could put toward, say, investigative journalism. Stand-down rules are what the Paypal-owned coupon extension Honey have been accused of violating. “Lots of shopping plugins over the years have had trouble with stand-down. It can be a little bit confusing,” Edelman added. “You have to keep track of which user clicked which affiliate link when.”

The big question at this point is how much worse this can get for Phia. In order to rise to the level of fraud as The Fashion Law editor-in-chief Julie Zerbo recently explained on the Back Row podcast, a prosecutor would need to prove intent. Edelman said Phia “cheated” by logging which sites had referred a user. “They even classified certain referrals. They said ‘competitor’ affiliate link detected,” he said.

Phia gave a statement to Bloomberg that, in both my and Edelman's view, framed these issues as mistakes. “I guess that could be a mistake. I mean, it’s a mistake the way not putting your shoes on is a mistake,” said Edelman. “I reference that because it’s so totally obvious — who could make such a fundamental mistake? But at least not putting your shoes on is just dumb. It’s going to hurt your feet. You don’t benefit from it.” Perhaps a better analogy, he said, is that it's “a mistake the way under-reporting your income on your 1040 is a mistake.”

“Frankly, it made me surprised and a little bit disappointed for them to try to characterize it as a mistake,” he added.

Edelman said in law school he learned the phrase cui bono, which translates to who benefits, suggesting that whoever benefitted from something is the culprit. “Because of the nature of the violation, it doesn’t look like a mistake. I’ve seen stand-down mistakes,” Edelman continued. “You didn’t accidentally rob the bank because you thought it was your house. You walked into a bank and you went into the vault and you got the money out and you did that because you were trying to rob the bank.” Regarding Phia, and given the information we have right now, “As an outsider, I have to draw an inference, but I feel comfortable with the inference based on a while of doing this kind of work. I have drawn inferences like this, and they’re usually correct.”

As of now, no one has filed a suit, but Edelman thinks legal action is a real possibility.

“If you’re the temporary special assistant city attorney of Boise, and a company in Boise comes to you and says, ‘We lost $70,000 to this Phia thing. Can you help us?’ On one hand, there’s the obvious temptation to say, ‘I’m from the government and I can’t do anything.’ There’s another temptation to say, ‘My goodness, I have a constituent with a real problem. It’s an interesting and genuine problem… if I worked on this, suddenly I’ll be famous.’”

Back Row has reached out to Phia for comment.

Italian Police Visit Chanel

Do sweatshop probes have any effect on the perception of luxury brands that sell "craftsmanship"? 

Italian authorities have been investigating workshops there, leading to seemingly damaging headlines like the Wall Street Journal's infamous, "​​Christian Dior’s $57 Handbags Have a Hidden Cost: Reputational Risk."

Recently, Italian police visited the offices of nine luxury brands, according to The Fashion Law, including Chanel, Goyard, Bulgari, Moncler, Brunello Cucinelli, and Etro. Investigators traced packaging materials with the brands' labels to Chinese-owned subcontractors who have been accused of worker exploitation. Earlier this year, police shut down an Italian workshop, manufacturing for undisclosed brands, where employees worked 90-hour weeks for 4 euros an hour, sleeping in unsanitary dormitories in their workplace.

In May 2025, Valentino Bags Lab was placed under judicial administration for subcontracting to exploitative Chinese-owned workshops, but that was lifted this April after the brand introduced new supply chain controls.

This type of probe would seem especially damaging for a brand like Chanel, riding high on Chanelmania. All luxury brands do this, but the most expensive ones — like Chanel — bear the highest burden when it comes to justifying their exorbitant prices to consumers as the cost of "craftsmanship." (The brand already got flack for selling "silk-grade polyester" this year, but still.)

However, this may not register negatively with consumers… at all. As a former Loro Piana employee once told me, Bloomberg's investigation revealing vicuña farmers volunteer their services so that LVMH can sell $9,000 vicuña sweaters did not seem to negatively impact sales. The headlines only seemed to increase awareness of vicuña. 

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