Is AI’s Uncanny Valley Fashion’s Next Playing Field?

Fashion always reflects the zeitgeist, and the rapid development of AI is one of the main cultural conversations in 2025. Brands are deeply split on how to approach it: some are countering it by emphasizing craft and investing in IRL community world-building events, while others are claiming early adopter status via customer-facing AI stylists and shopping tools. Should luxury reject AI as the antithesis of its values, or lean into the unknown? Nowhere is fashion’s AI neurosis felt stronger than when it comes to creative campaigns.

Valentino’s recent digital art ad for its DeVain bag is a case in point. This week, the brand dropped the sixth artwork in a nine-part series of visual stories dedicated to its Garavani DeVain shoulder bag, which the brand describes as “a starting point for a reflection of contemporary creativity, reimagined through the digital medium as a form of artistic expression”. The artwork in question, by multi-disciplinary artist Christopher Royal King (alias @TotalEmotionalAwareness), is a trippy AI-generated animation that blends pop-surreal imagery of rock concert crowds with motifs from the bag’s design, their forms bending out of shape and dissolving into one another to an ambient soundscape. It’s a bold play on the most common criticism of AI imagery: its tendency toward entropy, or rather, “AI slop”. Cue a social media backlash criticizing the artwork as exactly that.

Scrolling through the thousands of comments from consumers and creatives on the brand’s Instagram post of King’s piece, most of the critique centers around the idea that the artwork sits at odds with what people would expect from a luxury house. But that’s exactly the point.

“I didn’t want to simulate luxury — I wanted to record it, distort it optically, archive it emotionally and let the rest of the questions hover without needing immediate answers,” says King. The artist combined photographs from his book library of 25 years as a touring musician with 3D scans, photographs and films he took of the physical bags using primitive cameras, including a plastic Fisher‑Price PXL‑2000 toy camera. This achieved analog imperfections and glitches that he says served as “intriguing source material” with “unexpected texture and motion” to initially feed into the AI. Tape compression, tracking noise, color bleed and smeared motion “created a kind of honesty that feels archival and uncanny — the exact territory I wanted to explore”, King says, explaining that he then fed this material into the AI model and then back into the analog cameras to create a feedback loop.

In a press release accompanying the artwork series, Valentino (which did not provide additional comment by time of publication) is clear that King’s visual story is made with AI. The brand introduces the project’s ethos by stating: “Each artist interprets the DeVain bag as a symbol of creative freedom and individuality, merging experimentation and imagination.” For King, leaning into AI’s perceived shortcomings to emphasize the uncanny was exactly what he hoped to achieve.

Brands are cognisant of consumer fatigue with incessant brand and creator ads on social media, paired with their existential dread of living in an age of intense geopolitical and economic instability, and the proliferation of AI. In 2025, brand marketing strategies have centered around radical honesty over excess polish and embraced surrealism to meet consumers where they are. In 2026, could authentic, glitchy experiments be the safest way to approach AI?

A binary reaction

The creative industry is divided. “Some in fashion are suddenly embracing the aesthetic instability of a tool with no creative guardrails, but that instability is already creating a clear split for 2026,” says Shaun Singh, CEO and founder of trend forecaster Death to Stock. “On one side, you’ll see teams leaning into ‘clearly AI’ surrealism: visuals that feel intentionally unstable because the chaos becomes the statement. This is where AI slop starts functioning like the new digital surrealism, a way to break visual expectations in ways photography never could,” Singh says.

“On the other side, you’ll see an equally strong push toward the ‘obviously human-made’ look: tactile materials, rough type, physical textures, in a return to imagery with friction and evidence of process,” he predicts. Both sides of the coin are wrestling with the same cultural anxiety: what “real” and creative output actually mean in a post-AI hype world.

While the process behind King’s Valentino story included several manual steps, physical photos and films created specifically as AI inputs, AI models that are fed solely AI-generated content are more likely to generate hallucinations. Part of the success of campaigns that turn AI’s flaws into provocation could therefore hinge on how creatives approach working with the machines.

“Valentino’s campaign leans straight into this tension; not by endorsing AI, but by exploiting a medium with no guardrails,” Singh says. “In that sense, it isn’t AI replacing creativity, it’s creativity purposefully misusing AI to expose where the boundaries actually are — and that misuse might be the foundation of the next surrealist language in fashion.”

While the controversy of the DeVain posts is targeted purely at the use of AI, most creatives Vogue Business speaks to agree that this seems to miss the point of the project. “The decision to commission digital artists for the wider project is significant because it reframes AI not as a shortcut, but as a medium that requires authorship, interpretation and most importantly taste,” says Kyle Wheeler, global executive creative director of R/GA.

In its latest report Data is God, creative agency Morning describes consumers’ increasing openness to transparent AI experiments as a more “sloptimistic attitude”. “What we feel people love or enjoy about slop is that it asks you for nothing, in a world where every post has an agenda,” says Morning’s creative director Shadeh Kavousian. “Its purity really lies in its pointlessness. We feel like it is almost the new avant garde.”

It’s this feeling of ennui that King says he wanted to tap into with the campaign. “I wasn’t interested in making a direct statement about consumption so much as quietly wondering why everything — culture, trends, innovation, even disruption — seems to move in spirals rather than straight lines,” he says. “The piece gestures toward the idea that as technology approaches its own kind of peak, the questions get less practical and more metaphysical.”

Guardrails vs brand values

For brands that do dare to experiment, there’s a delicate balance to be struck between leaning into AI’s flaws and neglecting the carefully crafted brand values that luxury fashion houses have maintained for decades. Consumers are discerning and have come to expect certain visual codes from certain brands. Not all surrealist images are made equally, and the backlash from recent brands’ AI experiments is much more fierce than those where CGI and VFX achieve the surreal.

“It doesn’t feel luxury when it’s lazy,” says model and writer Nassia Matsa, who campaigns for AI regulation protecting models and fashion workers. “It’s easy to spot a text written by AI, or a picture as it feels a bit off. You need to manufacture a dream in order to sell a high-priced garment, rather than just a prompt.”

Valentino describes its brand values on its website as “mastery, care, creativity and obsession for detail”, with King adding that the brand set guardrails for the project.

“There were still clear expectations: respect for the brand spirit, iconography, emotional tone and high-end visual language,” he explains. “So boundaries around deliverables and narrative clarity, rather than creative methods. Luxury isn’t the absence of distortion, or new tools. It’s the presence of a distinct point of view applied consistently enough that it becomes the brief.”

Experts argue that as with any craft, success hinges on the execution. “The brands who succeed won’t be the ones who generate the most [content], but the ones who curate the best and refine it with the same intensity they bring to their products and collections,” says Wheeler.