Welcome to the Vogue Business Careers Guide: AI Edition. Based on a survey of over 300 industry professionals and students, this series unpacks how AI is changing careers in fashion and beauty at every level, and what it takes to future-proof your path in the AI age.
AI is pervasive enough now to consume our thoughts. Will it shop for us? Replace our doctors, friends, lovers? Or take our jobs?
This last fear is perhaps the most widespread, especially in fashion. And it’s weighing on those preparing to enter the workforce the most. In a recent Vogue Business survey of over 300 current and aspiring fashion professionals, just 32% of students say they feel positive about AI’s future impact on their careers, compared with 47% of non-students.
“I feel like my education and creativity are being prioritized lower than ‘efficiency’, and the idea that ‘that’s just the way it is now,’” shares one disillusioned Fashion PR and Communications student at one of London’s top fashion schools. “It’s killing the artistry in designs. What is left in fashion if the artistry is gone? A mass-market, trend-driven system, which is not what I strive for,” shares a fashion design and development student from the same university.
Among our survey respondents, a fear that AI will jeopardize creativity and human output stands out, with students more concerned than non-students (27% vs 24%, respectively). Meanwhile, students are also more likely to express concerns about the ethical and environmental implications of AI’s adoption by the fashion industry (16% vs 10%). This AI-driven disillusionment with the future of fashion careers chimes with what fashion educators say of their students.
“A lot of our students are not necessarily fearful of these kinds of technological innovations, but because of how things like AI are often reported upon, where it’s very clickbaity and fearmongering, it’s incredibly off-putting to young people,” says Margarita Louca, digital lead for the Fashion program at London’s Central Saint Martins (CSM). “So you can imagine that the default for them is resistance, rejection outright, and sometimes anger, which is justified in a lot of cases.”
With a constant churn of headlines predicting AI-initiated job loss, it’s no wonder. But oftentimes, these predictions are based on assumptions that the drop in global hiring since the pandemic is down to the simultaneous onset of the generative AI boom. In reality, it’s more nuanced — a closer look at the data shows AI isn’t the culprit, at least yet. Economic uncertainty and monetary policy shifts are the primary drivers of lower global hiring, for example, according to LinkedIn’s Labour Market report, released last week. And for students wanting to break into fashion, having an understanding of what AI can do and formulating a personal view on the tech is much more important than choosing to use it for creative endeavors, fashion educators say.
“I think the first barrier is trying to remove a little bit of the emotion so that we can have a dialogue,” Louca says. “It’s incredibly important, regardless of whether you choose to actually engage with or embed any of these tools in your practice, to have an understanding of how AI is going to affect wider culture, how that will play out in our industry, and then to question that.”
More senior respondents, who’ve lived through previous industry shifts like the dawn of e-commerce, are more likely to think positively about AI and view it merely as the latest tech evolution. “The only truism about fashion and retail is that you have to move with the tide and the times,” concludes one Gen X respondent who works as VP of sales at a luxury brand. It is, of course, easier to take this view as an experienced employee, than it is as a student questioning whether your dream job will one day be supplanted by AI.
Turning fear into curiosity is a crucial mindset shift that fashion educators are trying to encourage. “The only way you can actually learn how to use these tools is by experimenting and making mistakes,” says Dr. Liz Gee, dean of the fashion business school at London College of Fashion (LCF). “So we’re trying to normalize experimentation and iteration, because that’s what AI allows you to do by default.”
Fashion educators engaging with the industry say they’re evolving their courses in real time to keep up with the rapidly changing tech and prepare students for a shifting jobs landscape. For Emma Thompson, a lecturer of Fashion Marketing and Business at Norwich University of the Arts, this means tailoring courses around a longer-term view of the industry. “We’re having bigger picture conversations about the industry much earlier with students now, so we’re figuring out with them, what are the emerging roles?” she says. “We’re preparing you for jobs with technologies that don’t exist now that will in five years, and constantly thinking about what things will look like when you’re two years post-graduation.”
It’s more than just learning how to use AI. Fashion educators, consultants and career advisors all tell Vogue Business that to land and future-proof your job in fashion, it’s equally — if not more — important to learn how to sell your humanity. So, what are the steps young people can take to get their foot in the door?
Engage critically, explain the why
Above all, experts encourage those aspiring to a career in fashion to take a step back and think. Think not only about what the tech does, how it can be applied, and whether to embrace or reject those use cases, but also about what makes us human, creative, intelligent and able to relate to each other.
This has come out as the top skill that fashion employers are looking for during regular industry advisory panels with larger retailers and smaller brands that LCF’s business school set up late last year to cross-reference AI learnings.
“We’re getting a really good understanding of what the industry is expecting our students to be able to do and to be able to deal with, and it’s not necessarily technical skills at all, it’s more soft skills,” says Dr. Gee. “It’s all about the ability to ask a good question, have a play with the tools, and to be able to critically evaluate what comes out.” She says that across the fashion school, LCF has updated its assessment processes to focus more on the human behind the AI. “Before, you’d focus on output and how good that is, but now what’s more important is the process, and how a student is criticizing that as they go along.”
Vogue Business student survey respondents say they’re predominantly using AI for research, help with generating draft ideas and visual mock-ups for creative projects, and envisioning fledgling design ideas on the creative side. Students on more commercial fashion courses are also using AI for trend analysis and to generate more detailed target customer profiles or “muses”. Their focus is on these sparring partner use cases, rather than creative outputs themselves.
“When I do use AI chatbots, I use them to help me project-manage tasks. I don’t outsource my thinking,” one survey respondent studying a Fashion MBA in Washington says of how she’s future-proofing her engagement with the tech.
Student survey respondents say the skills they think will be most important for their careers going forward are understanding how to use AI (18% of students vs 10% of non-students), judgement and responsible use of AI (16% vs 10%), and critical thinking and oversight of AI outputs (16% vs 23%). But when asked what steps they’re taking to future-proof their careers against the tech, most respondents interpret this more as “how do we protest against AI”, not how do we upskill, which is how older generations interpret the question.
“I have asked this question to lecturers, who say that a fashion communications career will not be affected by AI, only enhanced. I disagree,” one respondent studying Fashion Communications in London says. “I don’t use AI in classes, or with assignments and work — I learn from resources outside uni instead. I want to know how to do it myself.”
Fashion educators also say that where students are choosing to engage with AI in their creative practices, brands have taken note — and, in some cases, commissioned visual work — from those seen to be experimenting with new technologies, critically and thoughtfully.
“A lot of our students are doing really fascinating things where they’ve built their own GAN [generative adversarial network, a type of image-generating machine learning system], and fed it with their own visuals like photography,” Louca says. “Where it becomes really exciting is when AI doesn’t spit out a finalized design, but shows you patterns that perhaps you yourself are unaware exist in your practice. So it’s giving them a point of friction to stand back and think: ‘OK, interesting, that design is great. But now I need to step in and make that pocket actually function.’”
For those applying to more creative roles like design and fashion film, experts say it pays to be able to talk about every step that led you to an outcome or an application of AI.
“Use AI tools if they feel suitable to show your mock-ups and ideas. But then, in terms of the interview, portfolios and websites, we’re seeing things evolve to really focus on process,” says Thompson, who suggests that being able to talk about the visual research and analysis that got you to a final image or design is what carries the most weight.
“At the end of it, the outcome is nice, but employers want to see whether you could redo it again if the technology failed, or if you were in a space where you needed to think of even more ideas. We talk a lot about helicopter pitches — being able to talk about yourself out loud as well as written. So, here’s who I am, this is what I do, here’s my approach and my process,” she says.
Where knowledge is easier to come by via AI search, emphasizing your awareness of the bigger picture is key. “To be employable, you still need a really good understanding of the whole fashion system,” says Lois Baile, acting course leader for LCF’s Fashion MBA. “Knowledge is a commodity now, but you’ve still got to have that basic understanding to know whether something is wrong, or just rubbish.”
Read the room and sell yourself
This ability to zoom out and understand how AI fits within the bigger picture applies once you’re inside an organization, too, where career advisors say that AI knowledge presents a huge opportunity for progression, if communicated with humility. Where a strong point of view on AI and its applications is recommended to students explaining their practice, career experts emphasize the value in taking time to understand the nuances of the business you’re working for, before suggesting how the tech could be introduced.
“You have to learn the business first,” says Karen Harvey, CEO and founder of Karen Harvey Consulting, a luxury advisory firm that helps place talent. Harvey underlines how luxury brands in particular will likely be much slower with AI adoption than young people would expect, because the creatives within them are particularly worried about their work being watered down. “I think one of the major skillsets that we all need to learn as we’re coming into our careers is: read the room,” she says. “It’s all about the right person, right place, right time, right amount.”
Given that the focus is so much on soft skills once you’ve begun working for a fashion company, experts say that in many ways, AI hasn’t changed the way you should operate within your team to get ahead.
“AI is a proxy for just how complicated the workforce is right now,” says Grace McCarrick, workplace culture expert and soft skills coach. “What we’re saying about AI — that you need to understand what your manager really cares about, what they fear, what their business goals are — applies regardless.”
If, say, you’re 22 and work in a fashion business, and your colleagues are talking about how to start using AI, McCarrick suggests using an AI tool for something innocuous to begin with — setting yourself up as someone who’s savvy about it and who others can learn from. “Start in low-stakes ways,” McCarrick says. “Be value-forward, use it in ways that people don’t feel threatened. But when the conversation starts and board members begin to ask how the company is using AI, it all trickles down to you, because you taught your manager how to use it six months ago,” she adds.
Beyond these considerations, it’s also crucial to understand the brand’s values and narratives before suggesting an AI tool.
“First and foremost, it’s about originality and cultural capital. Brands employ people for the knowledge that they bring,” says Thompson. “So yes, you can write something quickly, but what’s your awareness of what’s going on? What groups are you tapped into? What information can you bring? This understanding of your brand’s customer and the landscape of what’s happening at the moment is as important as an understanding of your team.”
Careers advisors emphasize the importance of walking team members through how you’ve used AI, and being overt about how that’s been useful, always taking the time to explain how your human taste and judgement shaped the outcome. As there’s no AI standard in fashion yet, consultants and educators say that young people going into fashion careers in 2026 have the ability to create their own niche.
“Any time there’s a new, exciting technology that comes along, the first thing humans do is get frightened and think, ‘How is this going to replace me?’ And every decade, certain jobs end up being less important or eradicated,” Louca says. “So we can either fall into despair, or we can try and be proactive and think, ‘What do I imagine is something that’s easily automated or replaced in a couple of years, and what is a new opportunity where there’s something specifically human needed?’”
Louca says she’s honest with students that during the first couple of years post-graduation, progress may be slower than they expect — and they will have to work “quite relentlessly”.
“But it’s all about taking risks,” she says. “If you’re really engaged with the work that you want to create, you will find a way. The new reality is roles will be constantly changing, so it’s all about plasticity and being adaptable with how you create your work and what mediums and ideas are worth investigating. Employers will reward curiosity and a willingness to constantly learn above all else.”
