This article is part of the Vogue Business 100 Innovators: Class of 2025, an annual list of individuals Vogue Business editors believe have the potential to change the luxury industry for the better.
After the post-metaverse era lull, fashion tech came back in a big way this year.
Wearables, generative AI, digital avatars and more tech all became fertile ground for experimental fashion companies that had, for the most part, put tech innovation on the back burner. Some of this, like the AI surge, is a sign of a larger shift in how we search, shop and go about our daily lives — meaning it’s in fashion’s best interest to try to keep up.
This resurgence is led by a cast of founders, executives and visionaries who see a path forward for a fashion industry made better by technology. There’s a brand president with sights set on fashion for 2075; a founder of a creative agency on the frontlines of figuring out how digital twins fit into the advertising and e-commerce landscape; entrepreneurs who are using AI to finally crack digital try-on; a CTO combining her love for fashion with her ability to steer the AI strategies of major companies; a team that’s figuring out how to eliminate textile waste with technology; and that’s just an idea of who makes up this year’s Vogue Business 100 tech innovators.
Global president | Oakley
As global president of sportswear brand Oakley, Caio Amato sees the company as technology first, fashion second. “We’re here to push the boundaries of innovation and sports — everything we do is based on solving problems and amplifying human potential,” he recently told Vogue Business. It’s this mindset that has influenced Oakley’s string of carefully orchestrated product drops and collaborations in 2025 to honour the brand’s 50th anniversary — from designing a space visor with Axiom and Prada, to launching smart glasses with Meta. Amato’s vision of designing accessories “for 2075 and delivered to 2025”, is resonating with consumers — Oakley has experienced four consecutive years of revenue growth, and has been expanding across Europe with more bricks-and-mortar stores.
Co-founders | Refiberd
Tushita Gupta and Sarika Bajaj are co-founders of Refiberd, a startup that’s using AI to help solve the current textile recycling crisis. With Refiberd, they’ve developed an AI model that can accurately detect the material composition of garments — crucial for efficient textile recycling, and the step where the several high-profile sorters that have recently shuttered fell short. Refiberd’s model also enables textile resale by detecting counterfeits with its material analysis, and can serve as a third-party validation tool for digital product passports. The level of accuracy required is no mean feat, and Refiberd has 12 pilot programmes under its belt, as well as past partnerships with brands and manufacturers to train its AI model. Gupta and Bajaj’s tech has gained significant recognition in 2025, as Refiberd won Ebay’s Circular Fashion Fund as well as the Global Fashion Agenda and PDS Trailblazer Award for its potential to scale.
Chief wearables officer | EssilorLuxottica
Rocco Basilico was just 27 years old when he was made CEO of eyewear brand Oliver Peoples. At 29, he joined EssilorLuxottica as the group’s head of luxury house brands. Today, he heads up one of the most important strategic divisions for the global eyewear group: wearables. As chief wearables officer at EssilorLuxottica, Basilico engineered the company’s multi-year partnership with Meta, which yielded the first widely worn smart glasses — the Ray-Ban Meta, released in 2023. Now, he’s in charge of the group’s multi-brand strategy for a full category of AI-powered eyewear, which included an AI update for Ray-Ban and the first Oakley smart glasses released this year. As more and more tech companies and eyewear brands rush to develop their own smart glasses, EssilorLuxottica has something of a first-mover advantage. All eyes will be on Basilico’s strategy as the race to develop the first truly ubiquitous wearable devices heats up in the coming months.
Founder and CEO | Uncut
H&M caused a stir this March when it announced it would be creating AI-generated “digital twins” of models to use in its marketing campaigns. What differentiated the brand’s approach from others was the narrative it chose to surround this experiment — it pitched its use of generative AI as “amplifying creativity” and pre-empted the industry’s fears around models’ rights by giving models themselves ownership to use their twins, which they will also be able to use at other brands. Johan Bello was the creative brains behind the campaign, through his new tech-first creative agency Uncut. After co-founding creative agency Acne in 2007 — and selling it to Deloitte a decade later — Bello founded Uncut in 2023.
Uncut is pushing the boundaries of creative production by using AI in visual storytelling, from concepting and strategic development to the production phase. It’s a move that takes quite some courage — of all the use cases for AI, fashion brands are most hesitant when it comes to customer-facing creative outputs, where their reputation is most evidently on the line. But with Uncut, Bello is daring to meet the industry’s desire for speed, cost efficiency and limitless customisation with clever (and crucially, careful) applications of AI.
Chief technology officer | Daydream
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It took Maria Belousova years to find her way to fashion. She spent her career working in Big Tech, with leadership roles at Microsoft and Bing. In 2014, she founded Davai, a cloud-based social media platform, and served as its CEO. After a stint at online fashion retailer Bluefly as its VP of technology, Belousova worked to connect farmers to companies fighting climate change at Indigo, and then spent six years at Grubhub as its chief technology officer. All of this led her to her current role as the CTO of Daydream, the AI shopping platform that went live in beta this June.
Alongside co-founder and CEO Julie Bornstein, Belousova is overseeing the technology behind what the team envisions as fashion’s next discovery engine. “Search in fashion has never been solved,” Belousova said ahead of Daydream’s launch. Now, she’s able to engineer how people will search and discover brands and products by lending her love for fashion to the technology powering Daydream. As it competes with giants like Google and OpenAI, Daydream’s best point of difference is its innate understanding of fashion, and why we as consumers gravitate towards different pieces and styles for different occasions. With Belousova on the team, Daydream is one step closer to making AI-powered shopping a good experience for fashion lovers.
Founder | Intersexy Studio
From chequered jam toast to England footballer Cole Palmer making a cup of tea, you may have noticed that Burberry’s social content has undergone a playful transformation in the last couple of years as part of its wider brand refresh — an investment that’s paying off. Video artist and content specialist Dani Coyle was the mind behind these viral moments. As global creative lead for Burberry until October last year, Coyle led the team behind the brand’s social touchpoints, coming up with the ideas behind the quirky short and long-form video content that reached virality and captivated thousands of social media users’ attention. Coyle’s ideas are characterised by their playful nature — brands come to her for ads that don’t feel like watching an ad.
In October, Coyle left Burberry to set up an independent London-based creative studio, Intersexy. Later that month, she released Intersexy Studio’s first project, a series of social videos for Lanvin. Since then, Coyle has been busy collaborating with a host of other brands including Ferragamo, Burberry, Coty, Nike and Dilara Fındıkoğlu.
Co-founders | Doji
Virtual try-on is undergoing a renaissance in 2025, as venture capital investors vie to invest in the startups they think are most likely to become our virtual avatar go-tos. Doji, co-founded by Dorian Dargan and Jim Winkens (hence the “do” + “ji”), is one of the best funded — and as a result most championed — of the lot. In May this year, it raised a $14 million seed round led by Skims backer Thrive Capital, with participation from Seven Seven Six. These investors were attracted to the tech that Dargan and Winkens developed to power Doji’s lifelike avatars, building on the most recent advancements in AI.
Dargan and Winkens have developed their own AI diffusion models that generate an AI likeness of users based on six selfies and two full-body images, which they take within the app. Doji’s tech produces “photorealistic” avatars for virtual designer clothes try-ons, which have come on leaps and bounds from the industry’s first experiments with Clueless-style virtual wardrobes — they look more like the user than ever before. With backgrounds at Apple and Meta (Dargan), and DeepMind and Google (Winkens), Doji’s co-founders are tackling investors’ favourite retail pain point — personalisation — with the most cutting-edge AI tech.
Co-founder and chief technology officer | Whatnot
Co-founder and CEO | Whatnot
We’ve long heard rumblings that live-stream shopping — hugely popular in the Asia-Pacific region — was coming for the West. But US-based live-stream marketplace Whatnot is building real resonance with Gen Z users across the US and Europe. The platform, founded in California in 2019 by Grant LaFontaine (who is CEO and has a background in product management) and Logan Head (who is chief technology officer and has a background in software engineering), operates somewhere between entertainment and commerce, with a feed akin to short-form video platforms. In January of this year, Whatnot raised $265 million in a series E funding, led by venture capital firm Greycroft along with DST Global and Avra. Its valuation now sits at $5 billion, with the majority of its products being secondhand.
Lead creative technologist | London College of Fashion
Volumetric modelling goes a step beyond most of the AI-powered virtual try-on avatars that we see, to create “hyper-real” virtual garments with realistic physics and textures that move with the body. Costas Kazantzis is a creative technologist whose work is pushing the boundaries of digital fashion representation, using volumetric capture and his experience with VFX. As lead creative technologist at London College of Fashion (LCF), Kazantzis leads projects that integrate immersive technologies into the fashion and creative industries. This year, that included ‘Reskinning Reality’, a project with LCF that combines volumetric capture and digital fashion design, enabling hundreds of different garments to be ‘reskinned’ onto one moving fashion model simulation, all made from a single captured performance of a model in-motion. The tech holds potential as a big resource-saver for brands — reducing the need for physical samples and enabling creative video content without the shoots. Kazantzis has collaborated with global brands and institutions including Burberry, Snapchat, MIT and Epic Games.
Designer | Sununguro
Nigel Matambo was named one of eyewear brand Oakley’s “future five” pioneering creatives in July, selected for his wide-ranging interdisciplinary works that transcend the boundaries between the digital and spatial worlds. Matambo — alias Sununguro — is working with the latest emerging technologies, from AI to wearables, to explore how design, culture and systems can shape human expression and connection. Matambo has consulted LVMH on innovation, and launched Louis Vuitton’s digital wearables on Instagram. He’s also worked with late designer Virgil Abloh, A-Cold-Wall’s Samuel Ross, Pharrell Williams, Nike, Meta and TikTok.
Co-founders | Spiber
While a senior in high school, Kazuhide Sekiyama met his mentor and future professor Masaru Tomita. Tomita shared Sekiyama’s belief that the interdisciplinary advances between the life and computer sciences are changing the world. Inspired by this sentiment, Sekiyama entered Tomita’s lab at Keio University in 2004, and began researching with lab partner Junichi Sugahara soon after, with the goal of reproducing spider silk protein through microbial fermentation. After analysing about 1,000 species of spider, the pair succeeded in replicating a very small amount of spider silk. Then came Spiber, the Japanese biotechnology firm they founded in 2007, which specialises in Brewed Protein™. Made from fermented sugarcane, the multi-use fibre is both biodegradable and recyclable, according to the company, because it can be broken down into nutrients and reused as feedstock for the production of new protein.
Spiber has collaborated with fashion brands including Burberry, The North Face and Sacai, but has still faced its fair share of challenges — from heightened costs to longer lead times and a lack of accessibility. More than 15 years in, Spiber is getting ready to take Brewed Protein™ to the mass market. Last year, it established its first overseas branch, Spiber Europe, to accelerate business development and sales in the region.
Founder | Sourced By
Gab Waller made a name for herself at the forefront of the fast-growing fashion sourcing industry, finding hard-to-get designer items for celebrities from Sofia Richie Grainge to Kris Jenner. Now, she’s revolutionising that very business with Sourced By, her AI-powered platform designed to make fashion sourcing more efficient and scalable.
After growing her own sourcing business by 152 per cent from 2022 to 2023, Waller realised she couldn’t scale as far — nor as fast — as she wanted. Informed by her own pain points, Waller built Sourced By to streamline the backend sourcing process for sought-after vintage and archival pieces. The company debuted with initial funding from Pentas Ventures, and raised $300,000 ahead of its beta launch. Now live in beta form, Sourced By is in-use among select global fashion sourcers. This autumn, Waller will kick off Sourced By’s formal raise for $3 million, and shift out of beta mode by the end of the year, ready to hit the ground running in 2026.
Founder | Alta
A Harvard computer science alum, Jenny Wang has both a fascination with AI and with fashion. This led her to founding Alta, an AI stylist and shopping app, in 2023. This year, she raised over $11 million for the startup from Menlo Ventures and Aglae Ventures, as well as angels like Poshmark founder Manish Chandra and Doordash CEO and founder Tony Xu. Alta is built on over a dozen AI fashion models trained in-house, and lets users create personal avatars and upload items from their real-life wardrobes to their virtual inventories. They can create wishlists and specify their favourite brands, and ask Alta’s AI ‘agent’ what they should wear for a specific occasion, while giving it feedback if it makes a bad suggestion so it can make a better recommendation next time.
Wang believes that rather than quashing our individuality, AI can help us become more experimental with our personal style. She has big ambitions, including deeper integrations with brands, where exclusive capsule collections and drops could also be showcased in-app.
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