After the faces have vanished and the avatars have risen, the final step follows: fashion detaches itself from the human being. What began as a technical advance becomes a cultural turning point.
What remains is the simulation of life – perfect, but soulless.
Beauty Without a Body
The future of fashion belongs to digital models. Yet what is happening here is more than a technological shift – it is a cultural transformation. Fashion was never art but design: applied aesthetics in the service of seduction. Today, even this form of creation detaches itself from its origins. Virtual aesthetics know neither fatigue nor blur. Avatars do not age, sweat, or fail. Their perfection denies the human. In doing so, fashion loses its resonance space – the body as a carrier of stories, scars, and contradictions. What remains is the idea of beauty without risk, a sterile aesthetic.
The Loss of Spontaneity
In the great moments of fashion photography – whether by Avedon, Newton, or Lindbergh – the magic lay in the unplanned: a gust of wind, a glance, an uncertainty. Such moments no longer occur. AI knows no disruption. Everything is possible, yet nothing happens. The unpredictable, which once made fashion come alive, is now considered a flaw. It was often the break that gave an image its life – the gesture that wasn’t planned, the light that came too early. With control, chance disappears – and with it the risk that once made fashion a living experiment. Thus it loses what once defined it: the moment of daring in which beauty was not calculated but discovered.
From Staging to Simulation
Simulation has become the new truth. What once emerged in the atelier now arises in the cloud. Designer, photographer, model, and location merge into data. Fashion is no longer designed but generated. In this process, the figure of the designer as a creative force disappears. His signature is replaced by algorithmic style presets that can be endlessly varied. For the major fashion corporations, this is the ideal condition: no individuality, no risk, no charismatic figure who might disrupt control. The era of the Lagerfelds, Kawakubos, or Gallianos is over. The machine produces style, not attitude.
The Logic of Algorithms
Fashion has always been culturally shaped – it spoke the dialects of time and place. Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and New York each stood for their own codes. Yet this diversity dissolves as AI systems merge datasets from around the world into global averages. What matters is no longer what a culture wishes to express, but what sells. Brands like DressX and The Fabricant already show how virtual collections can emerge without fabric or bodies, designed for avatars rather than people. Algorithms read trends, evaluate likes, and generate the aesthetics with the highest turnover. Experiment becomes the exception, risk a cost factor. In the competition of corporations, it is not the new that counts, but the repetition of the familiar. Design is managed, not invented.
The End of Craftsmanship
With this development, the classical professions that once shaped the image of fashion disappear. Photographers, stylists, makeup artists, and set designers lose their foundation – not because they have become worse, but because they have become superfluous. Young people still study fashion and photography, studios still open as if nothing had changed. Yet the system is already obsolete. Within a few years, these professions will hardly exist. What once required teams of specialists is now done by a computer in seconds. With the disappearance of work, the collective experience that once made fashion part of culture also fades. This transformation is irreversible – not for aesthetic but for economic reasons. It follows the logic of capital: cheaper, faster, scalable. In this equation, the human being is the dispensable factor.
The Silent Disappearance of the Human
Major cultural shifts never began with noise but with habituation. As long as everything works, no one protests when the model is only an avatar, because it is more convenient. Yet beneath the surface, something fundamental is shifting: the image detaches from the human, and representation from experience. What remains is a surface without depth, a world that only looks like reality. In this silence lies the true loss: fashion was once an exchange between people, a visible conversation between bodies, gazes, and cultures. When this dialogue ends, only the echo of simulation remains – the end of touch, the gaze that is no longer returned. What fashion tests today as a social laboratory will tomorrow affect other professions as well: editorial offices, ateliers, and stages. The aesthetics of simulation quietly devour their children – and fashion applauds, as if it were progress.
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