Fashion, artificial intelligence and the end of photo models

The day will come when we will leaf through a magazine and all the people we will see in the commercials will be non-existent, the product of an artificial intelligence. Perfect models, indistinguishable from real people, of all ages, ethnic groups, features. There will obviously be objects: clothes, glasses, accessories. But people don’t. Or rather, we can say that every non-existent person, as in Walt Whitman’s famous verse, will contain multitudes: in fact, this artificial intelligence trains itself by digesting the images it finds on the Net, ours. In every photo we see, we could be in a pixel.

That day will come, and judging by what’s happening in the world of generative artificial intelligence, it’s not far off. To put it bluntly: I’ve seen the end of photo models and models. I have seen it in the incredible work of a Nigerian artist, Malik Afegbua, who published the (beautiful) photos of a fashion show that never happened, a show where the models were elderly Nigerian models that don’t exist.

But it’s not just about art. These are new companies that are opening up new markets and destroying the existing one made up of photographers, photo models, make-up artists, lighting technicians and so on. In the front row, and it shouldn’t be a coincidence, there are two Dutch startups. The first is called Lalalandlike the film that didn’t win an Oscar: he founded it in 2019 Michael Musandu, raised between Zimbabwe and South Africa before studying computer science in the Netherlands and launching his own company which, he says, will allow fashion to be more inclusive, to understand in the countryside the diversity that exists among human beings. The other one it’s called Deep Agency, was just born on the initiative of the serial startupper Danny Postma, but already allows you to create virtual models for 29 dollars a month. The die is now cast: Levi’s just closed a deal with Lalaland for the upcoming campaigns of the most famous jeans in the world. This it’s the future and it’s coming, but are we ready?