Generative AI has already entered music, movies, advertising and our Instagram feeds.
Now it has a London Fashion Week invitation.
H&M teamed up with legendary fashion photographer Nick Knight and SHOWstudio for H&M&YOU&I, an interactive project exploring what happens when traditional fashion imagery meets generative artificial intelligence.
Importantly, the project didn’t begin by simply typing a prompt into an image generator.
Models were first photographed traditionally, while other imagery was created through illustration. Those real-world visuals were then fed into an AI-driven system that transformed them into moving, interactive imagery.
The unusual part was that the finished visuals weren’t completely static either.
They could respond to the movements of models and audience members, essentially turning fashion photography into something people could interact with rather than simply look at.
Knight has argued that AI should be understood as another tool available to creatives rather than something designed to replace photographers, designers or artists.
And that’s where this becomes more interesting than another “brand uses AI” headline.
Fashion is currently having the same argument as almost every creative industry: where does using AI as a tool end and replacing human creativity begin?
H&M’s experiment sits directly in the middle of that conversation.
For some people, interactive AI fashion imagery represents a genuinely new creative medium. For others, seeing another major brand embrace generative AI will raise questions about jobs, originality and what happens to human-made imagery as the technology improves.
ither way, H&M managed to create something every Fashion Week brand wants:
a show people are still arguing about after it ended.
