AI no longer wants to limit itself to a techy male consumer base. Increasingly, it’s striving to become a cool-girl staple, with companies seeking to capitalise on the trend-setting potential of celebrities, influencers and the cloutier corners of online culture. From Steven Meisel-shot smart glasses starring Kaia Gerber and Hoyeon Jung to Gentle Monster’s forthcoming AI eyewear fronted by Anok Yai and Alex Consani, fashion and AI are becoming ever more intertwined.

The timing is significant. According to recent research, women are more sceptical of AI than men and more likely to think it will have a negative impact on society. For those betting big on AI’s rise, this poses a significant challenge. Despite the gender pay gay gap, women are responsible for up to 85 per cent of household purchasing decisions in the US, possessing a spending power of over $17 trillion. In line with their increasing financial independence and higher levels of disposable income, women are a more important market for luxury brands than ever before. 

Consider the latest product release from Snapchat’s parent company Snap: augmented reality (AR) glasses, called SPECS. Designed with a sleek aviator frame and made from what Snap calls “plastic titanium”, the $2,195 glasses are positioned as much as a fashion object as a piece of technology. They were launched in June with a campaign shot by legendary fashion photographer Steven Meisel. Cult eyewear designer Gentle Monster has also hopped on the bandwagon, partnering with Google and Samsung on its own AI glasses, with more designs due to arrive this autumn. Together, the launches point to a wider effort to make AI wearables feel less like gadgets and more like desirable objects for fashionable young women.

Few generative models illustrate this new direction better than Higgsfield AI. Launched in 2025, the software positions itself as an all-in-one AI creative studio that enables creators, marketing agencies, and filmmakers to produce cinematic visuals at any scale. According to the company, it now has more than 25 million users, generating around six million outputs a day, including roughly two million videos.

With Higgsfield, users can access presets to place themselves into fragrance campaigns, music videos and paparazzi footage, or use pre-written prompts to generate images with aesthetics like ‘pastel pink princess’ or ‘indie sleaze’. The platform’s main image generation model, Higgsfield Soul, promises “fashion-forward visuals with built-in cultural fluency” and caters explicitly to gen Z creators. Maybe they’d like to see themselves on a Parisian rooftop in micro shorts and a newsboy cap? Or perhaps they want to wear suede chaps in a drive-thru on the back of a unicorn? Both of these scenes have been posted to the Instagram account @higgsfield.soul, where the company encourages followers to leave comments like “DREAM” or “UNREAL” in exchange for AI prompts. Pinned to the profile, an ad for its SOUL 2.0 update declares “AI can be cool.”

Among these commenters is Dara Jireh Espinosa San Román, a fashion designer and stylist from Mexico who operates a clothing and jewellery line characterised by chunky silver chains and distressed finishes. “I use AI a lot, maybe more than I want to,” she tells Dazed. “There are people afraid AI will replace them or that its results aren’t original ideas. But for me, the prompt comes from my mind and experimentation – it doesn’t create something amazing by itself.” Another Higgsfield user is Veronika Kunatova, a Russian creative producer and art director. Coming from a small town, Kunatova values AI for its ubiquity – rather than having to move to a big city to pursue fashion, she can get by with a stable internet connection. “Since AI came along, I’ve only got more work and more interesting projects – both hands-on and in the AI space – and I’m really happy about that,” she says.

But AI’s ability to replicate the aesthetics of fashion raises a more fundamental question: does knowing something was made by a machine change how we value it? According to Jessica Carson, a social scientist, author of Wired This Way and PhD candidate researching the humanity of creativity, humans generally find handmade objects more appealing than machine-made ones – a phenomenon known as the “handmade effect”. “The mechanism driving this preference for human-made objects is the belief that it’s imbued with the love of its creator,” she says.

That distinction becomes more complicated as AI-generated work grows increasingly difficult to separate from human creativity. “Research indicates that when people use AI in creative work, they feel less authenticity, lower connection to what they’ve created, and lower intrinsic motivation,” says Carson. “Now, you can create more efficiently and produce work that is just as creative as a human’s. But that benefit you would get from creating the thing is largely diminished or compromised.” It creates an interesting contradiction for fashion: an industry built on the mythology of individual taste and creative authorship is increasingly embracing technology that can reproduce fashion’s aesthetics without necessarily reproducing the human experience behind them.

While AI’s growth shows no signs of slowing, concern about the technology remains widespread around the world. In the United States, the number who believe that AI does more harm than good grows every year, especially among young people. At the same time, confidence in the government’s ability to effectively regulate it is low. By giving AI the trappings of It Girl culture – fashionable faces, covetable products and an endless supply of aesthetically perfect imagery – the industry is trying to win over at least some of these sceptics. But there is a risk that fashionable exteriors and celebrity endorsements make the technology’s uglier realities easier to overlook, from the rapid expansion of resource-intensive data centres to the reproduction of racial biases and other forms of discrimination. Fashion, after all, has a long history of making troubling ideas – from elitism and overconsumption to hyper-thinness – look aspirational. Why should AI be any different?

Many brands are already integrating AI into their operations. Collina Strada and Moncler have released AI-assisted designs, while brands including Levi’s and Dior have experimented with everything from generated imagery to virtual try-ons. At its best, the technology can open up new avenues for experimentation, make certain creative tools more accessible and take some of the grunt work out of production. However, AI is already absorbing tasks traditionally given to junior employees in areas such as administration, copywriting and digital production, raising concerns that fewer entry-level opportunities will remain for young people looking to break into the industry. As the fashion landscape continues to be reshaped, there’s also a new generation of designers looking to shed light on these concerns.

Cap_able, an Italian brand innovating anti-surveillance fashion, creates knitwear with dramatic shapes, bright colours and psychedelic patterns. These elements are engineered to confuse AI’s pattern recognition software, leading it to register the wearer as an animal or inanimate object. For Rachele Didero, who created the project in New York in 2019, fashion communicates identity, with the designer as a mediator. But now, this interaction between humans has expanded to include machines, especially as surveillance tech becomes more widespread. “When I started, it was a very niche topic. I was calling it computer vision, machine learning, and no one knew what I was talking about,” she says. “At the beginning, we just wanted to build this physical protection from the machines. Now, we’re working to understand how they perceive us.” 

Beyond clothing, the brand serves to spread awareness about the growing risks to individual privacy, an increasingly pressing concern as AI-assisted surveillance becomes more widespread. With each piece averaging around €500, Cap_able’s designs reflect the costs involved in developing technically complex pieces in small batches. “Of course, the aim is to have something available to more and more people. We took a small step towards that when we launched the AI Camo t-shirt. It’s the item we sell the most.” More than anything, Didero hopes to be part of a movement that pushes for greater transparency around AI and inspires other brands to follow suit. Some already have: the new wave of “adversarial clothing” includes brands like Urban Privacy and Digital Camouflage, both based in Germany and fighting AI recognition.

Ultimately, Didero doesn’t believe that AI is inherently bad, but that knowledge is power when it comes to a technology developing this quickly. “It’s here, it’s now, and we have to learn how to deal with that.” Carson, too, praises AI’s capabilities when it comes to tasks like finding studies and troubleshooting, and sees its potential to democratise education and enable scientific or entrepreneurial breakthroughs. When it comes to creativity, however, she believes society might benefit from continuing to do some things the hard way. Maybe that’s the irony of AI’s pursuit of the It Girl: the closer technology gets to reproducing the aesthetics of cool, the more valuable the messiness – and imperfection – of an actual person behind them may become. “I think that in a world where everything feels so artificial, so contrived, so synthetic, what is going to become most valued is the imperfection, the weirdness, the quirkiness, the evidence of humanity that’s very difficult for AI to replicate.”