AI Can Design Clothes — But Can It Design Culture?

AI is having a moment in fashion, and not just behind the scenes.

Text-to-image generators are producing runway-ready looks that blur the line between concept and couture. Virtual models are walking digital catwalks in clothes that don’t exist, made for brands that technically do. AI-powered design tools are being positioned as creative collaborators. Maison Meta, the studio behind AI Fashion Week, claims it will reshape the future of fashion. Other platforms like Mercer promise designers they can generate entire collections with nothing more than a few prompts and a mood-board.

From campaign visuals to silhouette development, AI is showing up in every corner of the industry. Balmain has released AI-generated campaigns. Levi’s tested AI-generated models in the name of diversity. On TikTok, aspiring designers are building speculative collections with Midjourney and a few lines of text.

But as AI begins to take up space on the runway and in the design studio, a more important question emerges.

AI can design clothes. But can it design culture?

The Imitation Game: Remix ≠ Meaning

Screenshot from Midjourney’s explore page — showing how a single prompt can generate dozens of polished, high-quality visuals in seconds.

Let’s be clear: AI can generate aesthetics. It can identify trends, remix references, and produce visuals that feel fashion-forward. With the right prompt, it can churn out a streetwear drop that looks like it belongs in a campaign shoot, or a bridal look that echoes South Asian luxury.

But looking right isn’t the same as meaning something.

Culture isn’t just the look. It’s the feeling, the friction, the inside joke. It’s shaped by who wore it first, and why. It’s the difference between referencing something and living it.

When AI tools like Midjourney or RunwayML are prompted to design “Nigerian streetwear” or “Y2K Asian girl aesthetic,” they don’t understand the context behind those references. They’re remixing images scraped from the internet (often without consent) and reproducing something that might look right but feels hollow.

AI doesn’t grow up in neighborhoods. It doesn’t come from subcultures. It doesn’t experience marginalization, joy, rebellion, or community — all the things that make fashion more than fabric. So when AI designs clothes, it’s essentially copying a vibe without truly living it.

That’s why so much AI-generated fashion feels... empty. Beautiful, maybe. But lacking in story.

What AI Can’t Replicate: The Power of Lived Experience

On the left is an image of 4 men in ‘Zoot Suits"‘, on the right is an image of punk fashion in London (image source here).

Fashion has always been about more than clothes. It’s protest. It’s power. It’s memory. It’s the language we use when words fail, the armor we wear in rooms not built for us, the archive stitched into a hemline or folded into a hood.

Think about:

• Zoot suits in 1940s America, worn by Black and Mexican-American youth in open defiance of wartime austerity laws and racial profiling. Oversized, sharp, and extravagant, the suits became a flashpoint for cultural tension — a style that shouted presence in a world that demanded invisibility.

• DIY punk fashion in 1970s London, built from scraps and safety pins, born out of working-class anger and anti-establishment rage. This wasn’t just a look — it was a rejection of elitism, a refusal to dress “respectably” in the face of economic collapse.

• Diasporic luxury, where designers like Wales Bonner and Thebe Magugu blend ancestral references with high fashion. Their work moves across time zones and bloodlines — garments that carry memory, ritual, migration, and pride in every pleat and print.

• Hijabi fashion bloggers, who use styling as both aesthetic and resistance. In a global fashion landscape that often flattens Muslim women into stereotypes, their outfits speak fluently in color, layering, and choice — making space for modesty on their own terms.

Each of these examples speaks to a larger truth: meaningful fashion is shaped by lived experience. By context. By resistance. By deep cultural codes that can’t be mimicked, only lived.

AI models don’t understand this. They don’t know what it means to reclaim a silhouette that was once policed. They can’t feel the generational pull of a fabric, or the quiet power of dressing in memory. They don’t know what it’s like to be told your body doesn’t belong in a trend — and to wear it anyway.

As theorist Kate Crawford notes in Atlas of AI, artificial intelligence is not neutral. It’s built on systems of extraction. The datasets that train AI are often stripped of consent, cultural specificity, and nuance — reducing rich histories to searchable patterns.

And when that happens, fashion stops being culture.

It becomes content.

The Risk of Flattening Culture

AI Fashion Week NYC

These are some images from AI Fashion Week, where designers used generative tools to create full runway collections — many without ever touching fabric.

When brands and creatives rely too heavily on AI without critical thinking, we risk flattening culture into a series of trends and surface-level outputs. This can lead to designs that look global but feel soulless — stripped of roots, references, and meaning.

During the 2023 AI Fashion Week in NYC, many collections were visually stunning, but critics noted a lack of emotional or cultural grounding. AI could replicate looks, but not intent.

It also raises real questions about appropriation. A recent article from The Verge highlights how some artists are pushing back against generative AI’s tendency to mass-produce “fast art” — imagery scraped from existing work without consent, context, or compensation. As one critic put it, these tools risk becoming “doomsday devices” for creativity, cheapening the cultural value of images and overwhelming audiences with content that lacks care.

In the race for novelty, will we begin to reward speed over substance? Aesthetics over authenticity?

Real Fashion Comes From the Ground Up

AI is a tool. But like any tool, its impact depends on who’s using it, and for what purpose. It can reflect the values of its user — or it can reflect the blind spots of the system that trained it.

Used with intention, AI can support creativity without steamrolling culture. It can speed up production timelines, assist with prototyping, and even help make fashion more sustainable. But that only works when human vision stays at the center — when the tech amplifies the voice, not replaces it.

Some independent brands are already using AI in ways that feel rooted rather than extractive:

• CALA helps emerging designers prototype, manufacture, and scale ideas sustainably. Designers remain the creative force — AI is just the scaffolding that makes their vision more feasible and less wasteful.

• Finesse describes itself as a "Zara meets Netflix" — using AI not to design, but to predict what consumers want. Their model is demand-led, which helps reduce overproduction and make trend forecasting more inclusive.

• Some artists are using AI tools like Midjourney not to create final pieces, but to brainstorm — generating moodboards, silhouettes, or experimental mashups that feed into hand-drawn sketches or fabric play. The tech supports the vision, but doesn’t substitute for it.

The key distinction is authorship.

When AI is used to cut corners, erase context, or replicate culture without credit, it flattens the creative process. But when it’s used with intention — when it serves the story instead of stealing it — it can open up new possibilities.

AI doesn’t need to be the threat. But it also doesn’t get to be the hero. The most meaningful fashion will always come from people who wear their history, their politics, and their imagination — not just on their sleeves, but in every stitch.

Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of AI

This isn’t an argument against AI in fashion. When used thoughtfully, AI can be a powerful tool — for ideation, accessibility, and even democratization. But AI can’t replace culture-makers. It can’t replace the voices who shape trends from the ground up, who bring personal narratives to the table, who wear their histories as part of the design.

As fashion journalist Sophia Li puts it: “AI should be a collaborator, not a colonizer.”

As we move forward, we need to ask better questions. Not just “what can AI make?” but “what do we want to make?” and “who gets to shape the future of fashion?”

Because real culture isn’t just designed. It’s lived, felt, and fiercely owned.

And that’s something no algorithm can replicate.