LOOSE THREADS
Ex-Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri made her debut at Fendi and the online peanut gallery has taken the opportunity to drag her again. If you want to drag fashion stuff in a talking-head video… there is so much else to drag over one of the few women creative directors at a big brand. Chiuri addressed the relentless dragging in a recent Vogue interview with Luke Leitch: “[E]verybody remembers me because I did the big number in Dior! When a male designer does a big number, [it is because] he has a sense of business. But if a woman designer does a big number, it is because she is commercial.”
MGC’s Fendi. (Courtesy Fendi)
Which tech billionaire will be next to show up at fashion week? Fresh off testifying in court that the media he produces is not addictive or depression-inducing for kids, Mark Zuckerberg attended the Prada show at Milan Fashion Week, alongside his wife Priscilla Chan. The New York Times noted, “They were ushered in by handlers a minute or so before the lights went down, accompanied by Anna Wintour and Eva Chen, the director of fashion partnerships at Instagram.” Prada seems to have dressed him for the show in a tan sweater — or maybe he, too, caught the minimalism bug from Love Story.
Speaking of the Prada show: Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Carolyn Bessette in the show, was also there. It is wild that Calvin Klein did not host her at its New York show and that the brand failed to reissue CBK’s wardrobe as seen in the series, especially given the nearly 350 percent surge in searches for CK.
Clear designer bags can cost four figures. This, by Margot Paige, costs $85, which seems acceptable for a stadium bag.
Instagram is testing a “shop the look” feature, Puck reports, that effectively steers people away from influencers’ own affiliate links. And the influencers — like Julia Berolzheimer, who wrote about this on Substack — are not happy.
This lip balm, by EltaMD, is supposed to be one of the best, actually moisturizing lip sun protectors out there.
A week after it said it would acquire Depop for $1.2 billion, eBay is laying off 800 workers, reports Bloomberg.
rag & bone has a new, low-rise style of sweatpants jean and my interest is piqued.
And now, today’s big story…
What’s So Insulting About Gucci’s AI Slop
Demna is a designer for the internet era. It’s not just that he uses AI now or has long viewed clothes as memes. It’s that he’s divisive — his work as polarizing as much of our increasingly boorish discourse.
Friday, he will present his first runway show for Gucci. It’s not his first collection for the brand, it’s just his first use of the traditional runway format. Demna has a knack for hype, and the hype is already hyping: He unveiled his first Gucci collection in September through a short film and red carpet arrivals of stars paid to wear the clothes. It was the type of necessary internet spectacle he seems endlessly able to produce. It was also similar to a Balenciaga show he did in 2021, in which guests arrived to a red carpet only to learn they were part of the show itself, and again in 2023, in which Demna’s friends and family modeled the collection on a red carpet. (Perhaps I should note, as a point of differentiation, that the Gucci show incorporated a brown carpet.)
Now, for this week’s show, he has apparently reached into his bag of zeitgeist-y stuff once more and pulled out one of pop culture’s most menacing — or exciting, depending, perhaps, on whether or not you’re a member of the ruling class — forces: AI. On social media, Gucci teased its upcoming show, titled Primavera, with AI-generated images of a couple with a dog, a satellite with interlocking Gs, a black stallion on a beach, a Miami-ish couple sitting on the hood of a car, and a woman’s legs sticking out of a sedan.
Many online are making a big deal out of Gucci’s use of AI. The media has dutifully aggregated the backlash. And creators like Ly.as are asking why Gucci is doing this. (Kering needs to save money?) Unsurprisingly, Gucci has been accused of producing “AI slop,” and these accusers have pointed out that AI slop is “not luxury.”
But why has Gucci’s particular use of AI struck such a nerve? Brands including Prada, Moncler, and Etro have produced AI marketing imagery without nearly as much backlash. I thought the high-end brands could more easily get away with it than, say, Levi’s, because Levi’s is a mass brand trying to be inclusive. Valentino used AI-generated imagery to promote a handbag and was called “lazy” and accused of “rage-baiting,” but interest in “Valentino ai,” Google trend data indicates, was never as high as “Gucci ai.”
The Gucci line is red.
There’s a particular reason that these new Gucci AI images have gone so viral and drawn so much scorn. And that reason has to do with Demna.
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