Chat, in under 1,500 words, explain how the people inside the fashion industry such as designers, models, stylists and professors really feel about AI. (Kidding aside, this story was written by an actual human.)

When Valentino used AI-generated content to promote a sneaker campaign with Vans, the fashion world didn&rsquo;t debate the collaboration. However, it debated the method. Was it innovation or imitation? A playful experiment or a quiet warning? For the first time, the question wasn&rsquo;t what we were looking at as the output, but who, what and why it was made? We&rsquo;re now reaching deeper into the creative process.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, fashion moves to a different rhythm. The fashion scene sits at its own crossroads. We have heritage weaves, couture ateliers, indie brands, deadstock denim, digital lookbooks and now, generative design tools. The same industry that reveres handcraft is also learning to speak in prompts.
The debate isn&rsquo;t about fear. Designers aren&rsquo;t panicking. Models aren&rsquo;t protesting. Stylists aren&rsquo;t hiding their moodboards. Instead, there&rsquo;s a more quiet, sharper question forming underneath: what happens when an industry built on emotion, instinct and identity learns to work with something that has none?

As they spoke with L&rsquo;Officiel Hommes Philippines, designers RJ Santos of <a href="https://randolfclothing.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Randolf</a> and Nicolo Perez of <a href="https://nicolo.shop/?srsltid=AfmBOooSd4g7wz-lGdXo3S7-EjWh_3o49cboQ66PBzvOfARxHRKMJuSo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">nicol&oacute;</a> mentioned that AI is neither a fear nor a threat, but a mere utility. A fast and clever one, sometimes even a persuasive one, but still ultimately, a tool. It can draft boxy polo silhouettes in seconds, visualize pi&ntilde;a fabric illusions or mock up a new floral appliqu&eacute; without a single stitch sewn. What it cannot do, they both argue, is decide what matters.

&ldquo;AI is soulless,&rdquo; Perez says matter-of-factly. &ldquo;It can help me visualize my idea, but it will never be the idea.&rdquo; Santos is even more pointed: &ldquo;In the long run, AI might actually separate the real creatives from the ones who just know how to download references.&rdquo; If everyone has access to the same machine, then originality becomes clearer (not harder) to detect.

Both designers agree that the panic around AI feels misguided. Fashion has always absorbed new tools: Photoshop, CAD, digital printing, 3D sampling, laser cutting. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini just arrived with better PR. Designers can use AI the same way one relies on an assistant: to assemble and organize, but never to decide.
If AI threatens anything, it&rsquo;s the illusion of creativity. The people who rely on aesthetic copying or watered-down trend recycling are the ones now exposed. &ldquo;Maybe AI is good for the industry,&rdquo; Santos adds. &ldquo;It&rsquo;ll show us who actually has a point of view.&rdquo;
For now, AI speeds up the administrative tasks in fashion that once ate time: inventory, scheduling and directory for clients. But the idea and instinct, those still begin inside the human mind. &ldquo;Everyone has a different process,&rdquo; Perez adds. &ldquo;AI can assist it, but it can&rsquo;t define it.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Robots don&rsquo;t dream. Fashion is made of dreams.&rdquo; &mdash;Noel Hein

If designers worry about authorship, models worry about existence. Their job has always been to embody a story: to become the moving proof that a garment is alive. But now, a model can be generated in under a minute: flawless skin, symmetrical, no fees, no schedules, no contracts, no jet lag.
And yet, for model Noel Hein, that doesn&rsquo;t feel like a replacement. &ldquo;Robots don&rsquo;t dream,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Fashion is made of dreams.&rdquo; He talks about shoots where the room shifts because all creative minds collaborate. No dataset can ever simulate the shared emotional charge in a shoot.
Jullian Culas, who has spent 10 years in the industry as an international model and is now an entrepreneur and marketing director, is even less bothered. &ldquo;AI is just a new mannequin,&rdquo; he says. Real models are vessels and muses of subtext: confidence, awkwardness, rebellion or softness. They don&rsquo;t just show the clothes; instead, they animate the narrative around them. The file can show you the image. The real stories shared by people make it matter.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s like working with someone who has seen everything but felt nothing. Useful, but not a collaborator.&rdquo; &mdash;Jason Mago

For stylist Jason Mago, AI seems convenient, but convenience isn&rsquo;t the point in creativity. Styling, for him, is not about clothing arrangement but emotional architecture. It is knowing when a leather jacket needs a rosary, when a suit needs dirty sneakers, when a single undone button can turn a look from corporate to chic.
AI can suggest, simulate and categorize, but styling is a human argument. A negotiation between taste and instinct, trend and rebellion. And that, Mago believes, is where technology will always fall short.
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s like working with someone who has seen everything but felt nothing,&rdquo; Mago says. &ldquo;Useful, but not a collaborator.&rdquo;

If the designers, models and stylists approach AI from the inside, professor and tech designer Tata Yap views it from above by seeing not just the tool, but the system that demands it. Before teaching art and design at the Ateneo de Manila University, she worked in Hong Kong&rsquo;s fashion and tech industries. Talking with L&rsquo;Officiel Hommes Philippines, she speaks about AI the way one talks about a product release, not a prophecy: &ldquo;This is not the first time fashion thought a new technology would end it.&rdquo;

Photoshop was supposed to kill photography. Fast fashion was supposed to kill luxury. NFTs were supposed to kill physical ownership. None of those predictions came true, but each one reshaped the industry in ways that no one fully anticipated.
RJ Santos called AI &ldquo;soulless&rdquo;.
Nicolo Perez said it has no taste without a human mind to direct it.
Jason Mago reminded us that you can prompt an image, but not a feeling.
Jullian Culas and Noel Hein point out that AI can simulate a model but it can&rsquo;t carry a story, a mood or a memory.
The multihyphenated Yap affirms the voices of these creatives. She explains why those instincts are correct. &ldquo;AI is not here to replace creativity,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s here to replace time.&rdquo; Because the force reshaping fashion isn&rsquo;t AI itself &mdash; it&rsquo;s capitalism&rsquo;s demand for faster content, faster visuals, faster cycles of attention. AI didn&rsquo;t create that pressure. It simply arrived at the exact moment the industry could no longer keep up with the pace it set for itself.
Yap brings in the Gartner Hype Cycle, pointing out that AI is still in the &ldquo;Peak of Inflated Expectations&rdquo; which is the phase when people assume it can do everything, before the crash of realism levels it out. She laughs at the idea that AI will wipe out fashion jobs overnight. &ldquo;If anything,&rdquo; she says, &ldquo;AI will expose who actually has the edge.&rdquo; This shares the exact view of Randolf&rsquo;s Santos.

If AI is inevitable and fashion creatives have already accepted that, then the real task is not to protect fashion from AI, but to protect fashion through the humans who can and still give it meaning.

&ldquo;AI threatens labor value, not creativity,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;It threatens the human credit behind the work. The moodboard that trains the algorithm, the model whose face is remixed into a dataset, the weaver whose pattern is fed into a prompt. They&rsquo;re all still there. Just unpaid, invisible, unacknowledged.&rdquo;
And this is where the Philippines becomes a specific case. We are a country with rich textile heritage, weak IP laws, weak institutions and a fashion economy that already undervalues creative labor. The risk for us is not that AI replaces Filipino creativity, it&rsquo;s that it extracts from it, automates and sells it back without naming the source.
Which is why, instead of saying &ldquo;reject AI&rdquo;, Yap says &ldquo;understand and explore it&rdquo;, especially to her students in the university. There comes the suggestion for a creative guild, a shared standards body, a copyright framework for fashion data and even a consent system for indigenous designs.
Because if AI is inevitable and fashion creatives have already accepted that, then the real task is not to protect fashion from AI, but to protect fashion through the humans who can and still give it meaning.

If there is one thing everyone in fashion, or at least in this article, now agrees on, it&rsquo;s this: AI is not the enemy as it does not and cannot erase creativity. It exposes what was never creative to begin with. It doesn&rsquo;t replace originality, but we can define it better.
If everything can be generated, then the only thing that matters is what cannot be generated: instinct, memory, cultural depth, lived taste, the human pulse inside the work.
So, the task for fashion isn&rsquo;t to run away from AI, nor to surrender to it. It&rsquo;s to evolve with it on our own terms by building systems that protect credit, preserve heritage and advocate for the hands and minds behind each stitch.
Creativity was never about tools anyway. It was always about the storyteller. And no matter how real the render becomes, the story still begins and belongs to us.

AI Is Moving Deeper Into Fashion. Should We Be Worried?

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