Fashion has always stood as a creative agent, where the mind challenges society, the world and the structures that dictate everyday life. However, when the creative agency that drives the silhouettes, identities and provocations society uses to express, question, and even resist begins to conform and subject itself to the expectations of artificial social advancement, agency concedes autonomy. At the forefront of creativity, fashion, Fashion Month and Vogue World have always upheld creativity and individual expression to the highest level, showcasing and supporting artists who create, inspire and dictate the cultural trends of society.
Controversially, Vogue World 2026: Milano shattered the longstanding legacy first curated by creatives such as Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and Gianni Versace with its introduction of humanoid models and an entire segment dedicated to artificial intelligence. Originally, the intention behind the robots, according to Vogue World 2026: Milano’s creative director, Juan Costa Paz, was to ease the tension of artificial intelligence within creative spaces and its emerging presence within the social world. However, with the looming tensions around artificial intelligence and its capabilities, along with environmental, social and ethical concerns, the spectacle achieved quite the opposite.
A history of Vogue World
Vogue World is the epitome of fashion, glamour, culture and ingenuity, bringing together the biggest names in both fashion and social culture. The event itself is a considered a street show for charity that showcases and celebrates fashion, its deep history, local culture and community causes. Vogue World has made its way through many of the biggest fashion cities of the world, including New York, Paris, Milan and even Los Angeles, capturing the life-force and spirit of the local fashion and culture of each city. While serving as a glimpse preceding Fashion Week shows, the event works to not only connect the streets and people of each city with the creative outlets it produces, but also give back to the community that has flourished and built the culture fashion clings to.
The first Vogue World served as a precursor to New York Fashion Week in 2022, which also celebrated the magazine’s 250th anniversary. For its debut show, Vogue World 2022: New York, Arthur Russel filled West 13th Street with an unwavering melody, catching the faint dew of the early morning atmosphere as bodies gathered into an anticipating frenzy. A blazing troupe of marathon runners dashed down the street as a gaggle of young female tennis players opened up the procession to that month’s magazine cover star, Serena Williams, in a silver floor-length Balenciaga cloak. Across the procession, designs from notable New York houses, such as Moda Operandi, Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, Nordstrom and SSENSE, brought out the true spirit of New York life. Throughout the event, guests and stars saw an immersive blend of the lifeblood between style, culture and community, celebrating the inspirations that lie within the everyday.
Vogue World 2026: Milano
As the teeming hum of anticipation loomed over Milano, Vogue World made its debut in the decadent Italian city, harboring a light where passion, ingenuity and opulent glamor collide. For 2026, Vogue World consisted of a five-act show with a core theme of craftsmanship and the human touch in the age of technology. The five acts include Act I: The Artisanal Revolution; Act II: The Industrial Revolution; Act III: Made in Italy; Act IV: The Age of Intelligence; and Act V: The Imagination Revolution. With this theme and a show split up by decades highlighting and celebrating craftsmanship, a section about AI, featuring four Unitree robotic models, remains contradictory to the other acts and to the overall purpose of the theme.
The biggest confusion of the ordeal doesn’t even come from the robots’ presence; it comes from the intent behind the choice to include them. Vogue claims the intent was to show how technology intersects with human creativity; however, that intent does not align with the show’s core purpose to celebrate Italian craftsmanship.
Moreover, the show’s robots, despite serving as “models” in a runway show, are not dressed in any garment or accessory. Even more so, their presence alongside models such as Alex Consani and Yumi Nu highlights the exact reason why humanoid machinery does not belong in creative spaces. The humanoid models remain stoic, they did not interact or contribute to any conversation around the creative force of fashion, and they did not express the passion, labor and creative intent or background that grounds fashion.
Artificial intelligence (AI) within creative spaces
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for the past decade, with research reaching back even further in the late 20th century. However, AI has never been so accessible and unrestricted until now, making it not only available to all, but also rendering it a vulnerable technology. The vulnerability of AI operates on two levels: AI’s newfound ability to operate outside of predefined domains and its increased vulnerability to manipulation. The new range of possibilities, while on the surface hinting at a future of technological progress, reveals the dangers of developing an autonomous form of artificial intelligence.
It isn’t inherently wrong to say all forms of AI usage are harmful, but it also isn’t inherently wrong to say forms of AI usage is useful within our daily lives. AI itself originates from Alan Turing’s Machine Learning and the possibilities of machine-based heuristic problem solving, which sit as the foundations of computer engineering. Across the following decades, up to the modern day, we have developed rote learning, genetic algorithms, the General Problem Solver (GPS), mobile robots, expert systems and artificial neural networks. Each of these theories, ideas and tools stems from Turing’s Machine Learning.
In our lives, we have smartphones with built-in AI technology, and even earlier, smartphone development included virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa. Moreover, cars have also integrated AI technology, with autonomous cars and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode, while other tools such as navigation apps and social media have given new meaning to AI usage.
AI integration beyond technology
Over the years, AI has dominated more than just technology; its capabilities have grown to cover every aspect of human intelligence and knowledge. Every corner of our lives, from education, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, finance, transportation, media, energy, legal services, art and, most dangerously, our minds, is influenced by AI in some way, shape or form. Many discussions note AI’s influence within the creative arts, which has forever altered the ingenuity, agency and credibility of art.
A key factor of AI is its ability to improve efficiency by generating content, information and varying outputs faster than the human mind, allowing it to push more boundaries at an accelerated speed. In recent years, efficiency has sat as the top priority in society, as more inputs result in higher outputs, often translating into an increase in wealth, efficiency and success. Consequently, the rate at which outcomes influence and define our social structure has superseded human capabilities, with advanced AI technology now producing a standard not humanly tangible.
Within creative fields, many seem to forget the intention that is held within art, which cannot be replicated by an artificial technology that does not create, experience or develop anything of its own. While artificial intelligence can guarantee a result with specific inputs producing varied outputs, the meaning, intent and significance of the output cannot be. As the arts become jumbled within the discourse, struggling to be recognized when they fail to produce the outcomes expected by society, their integrity falls prey to the fear of falling behind or becoming lost in the face of rapid advancement.
Psychological dangers of AI
As society has conditioned the brain to continuously produce outcomes, the mind has become accustomed to finding an answer or producing an outcome rather than dissecting or truly understanding the path it took to create the outcome. With AI, our minds have fallen into a lax state where cognitive thinking has fallen to unprecedented lows. Of course, with AI, thinking has been more unnecessary than ever. One can now use an artificial chatbot to produce any answers and ideas or complete a task for them.
The mind loses ground to an artificial mind and machine intellect when it unconsciously becomes dependent on its place within the body’s social, academic and professional lives. Metacognition is the psychological process that allows us to re-scope our own thoughts and think beyond what we already know. With large language models (LLM) and the social reliance on using that technology to complete cognitive tasks, the cognitive development of the mind regresses.
Pre-AI influence on the cognitive mind
Before AI made its way into the social realm, one of the mind’s biggest influences was social media, which has become an integral part of society’s daily lives. Social media, while undeniably a revolutionary tool of connection, learning and accessibility, has also developed into the biggest factor of cognitive regression. The mind has become accustomed to its presence and the ability to consume unsubstantial content at an accelerated rate. Of course, social media’s effects on the mind have varied, including reduced attention spans and an increased ability to multitask. Social media usage has also been found to increase ADHD symptoms for those already diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder.
Social conformism of the autonomy crisis
One of the common arguments within the topic of neurological impacts of social media is how it has affected autonomy and individuality. Social conformism is not a new phenomenon. However, the introduction of social media and the increased connection of minds across the world have impacted how the collective mind and the psychological tendency of “herd mentality have developed and influenced it within the past decades. Social media has not increased the individual expression and voices of society, but instead” has made it more socially acceptable to tolerate opinions, ideas or actions of conflict. The basis of this problem relates back to desensitization, which has been proliferated by social media, glossing over the emotional intensity and dangerous realities of topics such as war and environmental degradation due to the rapid consumption of content.
In every social media post, the realities of the world are only seen within a curated frame; users only develop the opinions of the voices that dominate the platforms, and crisis is rewritten by humor, trends and the rapid spread of misinformation. Now, looking back, these instances reinforce the cognitive regression of the mind, as the social mind does not question the information it is fed, nor does it develop the cognitive skills to think on its own.
AI and the autonomy crisis
AI’s integration within the past few years has brought breakthroughs, with AlphaFold’s protein-folding discoveries and the new range of autonomous vehicles; there is no denying the advancements it has made within society. However, not all AI usage is useful. This mainly lies in the fact artificial chatbots are accessible to anyone who has an internet-connected device. With such available access, along with the AI’s ability to perform almost every cognitive task, society has become accustomed to using it as a tool that the mind rarely ever conceptualizes or performs on its own.
Beyond using AI for basic information and thinking, social media has transformed the stigma around artificial language models, normalizing their usage. Social media platforms have gone as far as developing or acquiring their own AI assistants, allowing users to ask them questions rather than use resources online to find answers. Looking at the actual content within social media, trends using AI to change photos and create nostalgic posts, to generative music and TV clips, reinforce using AI for recreation.
Simply having content made by AI isn’t the sole reason why the mind has become so dependent on it. AI has so effectively become normalized through social media because it responds to the pleasures audiences want to see, activating the hedonic and reward circuits of the brain. Pleasure is built by different neural reactions to a stimulus. One occurs once the brain has latched on a liking reaction, activating opioid-sensitive hedonic hotspots. Along with liking, wanting creates the motivational force that makes a stimulus or reward enticing. To connect the two, learning binds liking and wanting so cues can trigger wanting automatically, which produces the pleasure connected to a certain stimulus. Feeding off the neuroanatomy of pleasure, the brain, when reacting to AI content specifically created to please, falls into a never-ending loop that results in a feigned desire for AI to fill the pleasures it brings the mind.
The human mind has developed tremendously, and yet, when it comes to protecting our cognitive freedom, our minds so readily give themselves up for a moment of pleasure, blurring the lines between healthy integration and addiction. With this growing reliance on an artificial mind to think in place of the human brain, our psyche has only conditioned the mind to rely on artificial machine outputs, egregiously compromising autonomous thinking.
Vogue World behind the tech
A runway has always stood as a creative space where human silhouettes, fabrics, emotions and movement collide, and storytelling takes on a whole new uniform. To place a clunky, stiff and inexpressive piece of metal on one of the most notable runways in the world, and call that an ingenious statement, is essentially yielding any creative agency and originality to the “Big Techs” who have been aggressively pushing themselves into cultural industries. If anything, the robotic stunt exemplifies the corruption within the technology industry as a force that attempts to take over the creative and cultural industries and transform them into mere cash grabs.
Vogue World 2026: Milan not only stripped the creative history of the fashion industry, but it also placed decades of genuine design, artistry and craftsmanship below a corporate technology spectacle. For a magazine that has stood as the number one force guiding and connecting countries and creatives across the globe, to pull such an uninspired stunt contradicts and invalidates everything Vogue claims itself to be.
Moreover, considering Vogue’s place within the creative industry, along with the fears of designers, artists and workers within their network surrounding displacement in the face of artificial intelligence, the decision felt especially tone-deaf. Rather than celebrating the people whose labor, vision and expertise have shaped fashion for generations, the event prioritized technological novelty over human creativity, specifically the very creativity that allows the company to even exist.
Featured image: “Lorenzo Riva” by Bruno Cordioli, CC BY 2.0
Edited by James Sutton
