AI is changing fashion. Here's what that looks like

Designer Raghavendra Rathore started his morning by “feeding” an AI chatbot over 50,000 words. The monologue covered his formative years, building an eponymous fashion house over three decades, and the influences on his work, including his signature creations, such as the Jodhpur bandhgala. “I am educating it (AI) about myself. There will come a time when you won’t need me to be present in an interview; my avatar will answer exactly the way I speak and think,” says Rathore, who regularly talks to the bot, a general tool. “It’s thinking more like me today than it did yesterday.” ​

A tech enthusiast, Rathore has been experimenting with AI for the past four years. He uses it as an archive keeper (“the different motifs of a leaf or silhouettes of suits I have designed”), a memory keeper (“it can tell what I was doing a year ago”), and, just for fun, a “what-if scenario” maker (“how different would my design language have been if I was in another country at the age of 9?”). Even as a “quiet design” partner. “It doesn’t tell me what to create. I speak to it, it organises the thoughts scattered across days, helps refine choices and aligns them, and then it answers with patterns I hadn’t considered,” Rathore says.

He gives the example of a client’s request to include his granddaughter’s painting in a suit. After several interactions with AI and the design team, the print of the painting became the lining. “Used with intention, AI doesn’t confine creativity. It stretches it,” says Rathore. “Perhaps this is how fashion will evolve—not by discarding tradition, but by letting a new form of intelligence breathe alongside it.”

From creating design and moodboards to runway shows and brand marketing, AI’s use in fashion is becoming more pronounced with each passing year. In 2023, when Marc Jacobs presented 29 fall-winter looks in 3 minutes, along with a ChatGPT-generated collection note, it was hailed as a defining moment.

Cut to 2025: Swedish retailer H&M presented digital clones of human models in ads and social media in July; Golden Goose, the brand famous for its sneakers, started an AI-based customisation service in November, allowing shoppers to co-design a shoe with the help of Google; Valentino included AI-created visuals in a December campaign; designers—both in India and abroad—regularly posted outfits worn by AI models on Instagram. What’s more, retailers like Zara are offering voice note-like services within their apps that connect shoppers to an in-built “stylist” (a bot essentially) to help them browse through options and find the exact pair of pyjamas they are looking for.

In other words, AI is no longer just predicting and analysing fashion. It is helping steer it.

That’s what was on the mind of designers Falguni and Shane Peacock while they were creating the collection, The Futureverse of Fashion, presented alongside robot dogs and humanoids in a show in Gurugram on 16 November. “The new designs were first drawn as a sketch and then turned into 3D to see whether they work, and then we made the outfit,” Shane says about the collection. “Earlier, we used to sketch, create the outfit, do test fits, see what changes were needed, maybe the lapel was too long, or the sleeves were short...,” says Shane, who had worked with IBM’s AI tool Watson in 2017 to create a runway collection. “With AI, I can decide on the screen what changes I want and then make a perfect outfit. Weeks of work are reduced to one day.”

Not all designers use it for the design process, though. Some brands like Iro Iro and Genes Lecoanet Hemant use technology for stock-keeping and logistics. “It’s a wonderful tool to get a sense of the world, open your eyes. But it’s more about information,” says Hemant Sagar, one half of Genes Lecoanet Hemant. “AI can be fantastic to create a dress with a 75ft-long train and it will look good on social media, but is it actually wearable? If I want to make a black sweater, which will always be in demand, how much AI do I need? But yes, it will help me crunch business numbers faster.”

One of the biggest draws of AI, besides reducing the workload, is the access it brings to the history of fashion. “I can show an app a sketch and ask if in the past 50 years any of the big fashion weeks (Milan, Paris, London) have seen anything like this before and evaluate how unique my sketch is,” says Shane. There was a dress at the July couture show by the Peacocks that had a temple motif. It was created using Midjourney. “I fed my idea of the temple (motif) into Midjourney, and then asked our artists to give the result our touch. AI can’t replace my craft, it can make it better.”

Agrees Rathore, who believes that AI won’t replace tailors, designers or artists. “It’s easier to tell your creative team by showing what’s on your mind on a screen (using prompts) instead of just talking in the air. AI has crawled all over the world and knows what, say, Michelangelo’s blue is like or what Dali’s watch is shaped like…that depth of access is unparalleled. That’s why it’s important for (design) schools to teach students how to train AI.”

Schools across the world are increasing their focus on AI. Last year, VisioNxt Trend Forecasting Lab, funded by the Union textile ministry, was established at the Delhi and Chennai campuses of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (Nift). The lab uses AI-driven technology to map consumption behaviour, predict trends and help designers of tomorrow evaluate relevant textures, fabrics, crafts and colours. Besides, students are also encouraged to use tech to improve their designs and patterns. “AI is transforming the entire value chain, from predictive trend analysis to digital garment simulation, virtual try-ons, and intelligent manufacturing. This allows designers and brands to respond faster and with greater precision to consumer needs,” says Noopur Anand, the dean of Nift (academics). “AI is not an add-on; it is becoming a core competency for the next generation of fashion professionals.”

Matthew Needham, a senior lecturer in sustainability, teaches about 1,000 students in a year at Central Saint Martins, a London school famous as the alma mater of Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Phoebe Philo. About 70% of them, Needham says, use AI to write their essays. “They use it for designing as well but it’s far more openly visible in their writing.” Outside the school premises, Needham has seen a drastic increase in the use of AI for design. “Design should be solution-led and make problems disappear. While AI can help with it, it can also make designing clothes easier and faster, resulting in more clothes and overconsumption.”

Over 100 billion items of clothing are produced globally, with 65% of them being dumped in the landfill that same year, according to a McKinsey report. If AI can offer an answer for almost everything, can it help address one of the biggest problems the world is currently dealing with: make fashion green?

Orsola De Castro, author of Loved Clothes Last and co-founder of not-for-profit platform Fashion Revolution, doesn’t think so. “We have those systems already in existence. They just haven’t been put into place.” While De Castro believes AI can potentially kill originality in design, she acknowledges its usefulness in helping small businesses and emerging designers to make business plans, write social media posts or press releases.

That’s exactly how Jaipur-based designer Bhaavya Goenka includes AI in her work. The founder of Iro Iro, a brand that specialises in upcycling and recycling textile waste, uses ChatGPT to write catchier descriptions for her outfit designs, collection note and Instagram posts. “Not for design purposes, for sure. I feel that a smaller brand like ours, which is more story-driven, needs to work more closely with people rather than AI because we need to stand out more in terms of our authenticity. The other issue with AI is the increase of copying designs…anyone can access your design to a tee, add a small change and call it their own.” Copying of designs will become a bigger issue as the use of AI increases. Just with a voice prompt, you will be able to take a motif from, say, Tarun Tahiliani, a tone of red from Dhruv Kapoor, a skirt style from Anamika Khanna, and an embroidery style from Sabyasachi.

De Castro offers a solution: an unremovable AI watermark that distinguishes between real and artificial.

When I ask Rathore about whether AI will facilitate copying of designs and compromise creativity, he says: “I don’t fear the machine. I fear human intention.”

As AI enters design studios, classrooms and shopping carts, the future of fashion will depend on how humans choose to use it.