Are Tech Bros Ruining Fashion

TITLE: Are Tech Bros Ruining Fashion? CHANNEL: Laura VonV DATE: 2026-04-30 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Are tech bros ruining fashion? The short and obvious answer is yes. The more complicated and human answer, how long has this been going on for? How bad is it? Can it be good? But most importantly, why does everything look the same and still fit terribly? I think we have tech bros to thank for this. Hello internet friends and welcome back to a newish series where I pick a topic focused around fashion and research the hell out of it. Recently the brand Allirds announced a complete rebrand to New Bird AI. To be fair, the company had been struggling for a minute. What started as a sneaker company making shoes out of Marino wool is now apparently looking to sell GPUs, but not really GPUs, more like GPUs as a service. In layman’s terms, they went from selling sneakers to offering big businesses computer power for rent. Or at least this is allegedly what they want to do. The company American Exchange Group bought Albirds to consolidate into their portfolio of existing brands. They’ve acquired brands like Ed Hardy and Echo and Jones New York over the years. With the now existing shell company of Allirds just chilling on the stock market, a financial backer offered up just enough money to make an interesting case for a brand pivot, if you even want to call it that. This garnered the attention of media outlets and thus they managed to crazy inflate the stock value for all birds on vague AI promises. They do have a name for this in the stock market, but I’ll let you fill in those blanks. And this weirdly wouldn’t be the first time a shell company changed an American business into something totally different. A spinning mill named Bergkshire and a manufacturing company named Hathaway merged together to form Bergkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett started buying up stocks in the company in the ’60s and eventually became CEO. But fabric mills weren’t really the best investment at the time. He started using the money from the mill company to buy up other companies, including well-known fashion brands, to expand his wealth through this dying shell company. By 1985, he closed the last mill and turned Berkshire Hathaway into the insurance and holding conglomerate we are all familiar with today. And stories like those are just the tip of the iceberg into why fashion feels so weird right now. Real quick though, before I take you any further down this rabbit hole, I do want to say a quick thank you to the sponsor of today’s video. That is Skillshare. The class I’m taking right now is actually perfect to counterbalance the stress of this entire video. I’ve been working my way through hand sewing basics with Bernardet Banner. If you’re not already familiar with her, Bernardet is a dress historian on YouTube. She’s amazing. The class walks you through the basics from different threads for different jobs, including the difference between different types of thread. And my personal favorite, the proper way to attach a button hole, which sounds so small on paper, but it is a massive skill set to have if you are an avid thrifter and pass up on certain items just because they are missing a button. Skillshare is where humans come to learn from other humans. The teachers are working artists, makers, and crafts people. Bernardet being a perfect example. And the classes are designed for so many different purposes. If you’re looking to start a YouTube channel and want to learn editing or scripting skills, if you are feeling crafty and want to learn drawing or journaling, there are classes for everything. The first 500 people to use my link in the description or scan the QR code will get one month of Skillshare free. Go take a class, repair something, make something, learn something. That’s what it’s all about.

Everyone says the future is strange, but I have a feeling some things won’t change. There are so many more insane stories in the fashion world and how we as consumers are impacted by everyday business transactions like all birds, but nothing as scary as the current change and everything with AI. So just how much is Silicon Valley impacting fashion? Not in the Zuck and Bezos showing up to fashion week sort of way, but what exactly are these companies using to build the businesses we are all buying from? Raspberry AI, founded in 2022, is a service where you can upload sketches or CAD files and get photorealistic images of what the product could look like. They also offer trend forecasting and even get product insight from synthetic customer groups to product test ideas. So, in other words, AI is role-playing the customer and telling the store if it likes the product it just helped create. So many companies at this point aren’t even using humans anymore to product test. They are synthesizing the experience. It’s a little bit more complex than that, but you would be so shocked at how many companies are already using tools like this. Raspberry AI received funding from Revolve’s co-founder and Reformation’s founder. Refabric is a similar competitor capable of building out designs based on sketches or prompts. LVMH is building out most of its own AI internally with similar sketch to product programs. Gucci recently worked with Open AI to catalog its entire archive to generate new styles based on its house language. Let that one sink in. But it just keeps getting weirder. Miy can also train an AI on business’s house code and generate products based on previous campaigns. The worst example of this is the Koopils recently worked with Miy to do this. The kicker in it is the Koopils was bought up by private equity. So it’s training based on designs and collections created under a different owner and founder. Here is a AI trend forecasting service. Their website lists clients like LVMH, Dior, Adidas, New Balance, and Monontlair. And it’s been around since 2013, but it mostly focused on static images for forecasting. Think Instagram and Pinterest data. But the tech is getting so good that now trends are moving at what feels like the speed of light compared to what they used to. The computer power just wasn’t there before to forecast using video trends. And now we are getting better and better at processing data. They can pinpoint trends even by weather forecasting. One case study looked at Levis’s and how a onederee change in weather in a certain area changed buying habits. And although this can have some seemingly positive results in mitigating overstock in different climates, it also takes away the uniqueness of a brand. Trend forecasting has always been this weird insider term that felt both manipulative and like weirdly kind of fun. Like, I’m not going to lie, growing up, I devoured trends. I loved seeing what Vogue and Harper’s Bizaarre had to say about the runway. Give me your top 10 trends of every season, and I’d be scouring the thrift stores for the original vintage version. But the older I got and the quicker these trends went from seasonal to monthly to weekly and now daily, I started tuning out because it became so overwhelming and almost a mockery of an already collapsing system. I mean, documented trend forecasting goes all the way back to the 1600s with the first magazine basically gossiping about politics and occasionally what people were wearing within the courts. The first dedicated fashion magazine popped up in the 1780s. And for sake of misprononunciation, I’m just gonna put the magazine on the screen. And it’s also not as easy as correlating these magazines to cause and effect. But while these magazines were circulating and the first case study of the democratization of fashion arrived, the French Revolution was also raging in the background. In 1858, you had the first Oak Couture labels started by Charles Worth, then Harper’s Bizaarre in 1867, then Vogue in 1892. Forecasting then evolved into color trend analysis in the early 1900s and Panton eventually took over as the industry standard and universal we’ll call it language of color. They control a lot of how the industry communicates with color and therefore you have to buy into it in order to keep up with the use of the language. And after all this takes place you can start to see a gradual shift in who controls the trends. By the 60s and 70s you saw the rise of trend agencies. WGSN was the first to go digital publishing trends online in the9s. And then by the mid200s, blogs like the sartorialist started popping up with individual people documenting fashion street style. The way we communicated trends became even more democratized because we all had access to them all at once. We lost the fashion houses controlling the narrative and now anyone could be photographed wearing a cool outfit and set the trend. Now, with the rise of Shien, Teimu, and Amazon, and honestly, it’s not just the big bad volume stores doing it. Dare I say even Quint, they are all using AI systems to comb the internet for what’s trending and using incredibly well-connected supply chains. Clothes can go from a highly viewed Instagram post to your front porch in as little as a week. All based on algorithms signaling what people would be interested in buying. Pair that with technologies and you can go from concept to manufacturing in such a short time period. And I think with most of these companies, it’s so telling that they are all hiring celebrity stylists and spokespeople for the brand instead of highlighting designers and talent. It’s because they aren’t using the talent in the traditional sense because a lot of the process is automated now. Except for the people actually making the product. That still requires skilled labor. And of course, those are the people making the least out of the process. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love data. I love numbers. I love seeing patterns in things. But a lot of what trend forecasting to me is is how does this impact the culture? What will this look like 10, 20, 30 years from now as defining the decade? It’s a way of telling a story about this point in time. Denim rose to popularity in the US in the ’ 50s out of youth culture and rebellion. Punk and rebellion as a style was a subculture in the 80s and contrasted that like yepy prep style that the elite wore. The ’90s saw a range of both minimalism and grunge. You could see a gradual shift in who controlled the trends. But with companies all using AI to generate the same trend forecasting and scrape the same data sets, is this leading to the homogenization of fashion for this point in time? Walk through a shopping mall and everything looks the same, just a varying levels of quality. You can buy a dupe of a dupe of a dupe, but good luck finding something that was designed with a brand identity in mind. And now we know a lot of the luxury brands are training AI on its own brand identity to keep copying iterations of the past. Most of these mall brands at best can give you a designer collaboration perfectly time to save a failing designer and leverage a little cash flow for both parties involved. Meanwhile, giving you the consumer a mediocre version of both brands. Pair that with companies focusing on safe bets and wins and everything looks and feels the same right now. And the scariest part is how fixed into this loop will we become? And can newer independent brands still stand out among seas of the same? Because at this point, even if they are doing something so creative and different, the moment it reaches the internet, it’s copied. We are entering a new era of intellectual property rights and constant lawsuits all because nobody owns anything and nothing is safe. And that, my friends, is why fashion feels so exhausting right now. and it feels almost impossible to opt out of the algorithm. That leads me to my inevitable final thoughts and hot takes because, you know, I always have some. Even though this video honestly in general was like altogether a hot take. Before we get into this though, I I do want to say full disclosure, I also edit in Premiere Pro and that’s had AI assisted tools baked into it for years. And no, don’t worry, I’m not going to go all Reese Witherspoon on you and tell you you need to adopt AI. But I will say a lot like my polyester video, there is a hell of a lot of nuance. AI has so much potential for good, but we aren’t using any of it for good currently. Right now, we are just using it to push consumerism into hypers speed and train it for literal atrocities. I mean, like I think the angst is palpable in all of us right now. I’m a pretty chronically online person, so I’ve watched so much discourse form around this. From the book controversy of Shy Girl to Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bulock basically imploring us to get on board with AI to Albert stock going up and down overnight because of like awful tech bro speak and vague promises. I’m, you know, I’m a big fan of knowledge is power, and I do think that we should at least know what AI is and how it moves through the world, but telling us to get on board with it and learn it is a thinly veiled way of saying people with heavy investments in AI are desperately making attempts to make AI cool. When the reality is they sold us down the river 5 plus years ago, most companies have already heavily invested in this infrastructure. You are unfortunately using AI whether you opt out of it or not. But quite frankly, I don’t think they care if we like AI or not. The shift to blaming the public for AI consumption feels similar to the recycling campaigns. Shame on you for not recycling your plastic bottles, even though only a small percentage of plastic is recycled. But it was a great way to make the general public feel like they were the problem when they are in fact not the problem. And also, just to be clear, I am not anti-tech. I am not even techiterate. I’m actually someone who spent the first half of my adult life adjacent to the industry. I used to work for Best Buy. I worked in Geek Squad. I had a few computer science classes under my belt. No way was I a computer wiz. I was just really good at googling how to repair things. I’m also a big fan of sci-fi. I have rewatched Battlestar Galactica probably more times than I should admit to on the internet. So, like I see the loop that’s happening right now. It’s terrifying. With the rise of all this and how completely unsure we all feel, I think a lot of us have kind of checked out. My me personally, I feel like I’ve read more books than I ever had in my entire life. I’m devouring fashion history books at a rate that like before was maybe one or two a year. I also read a lot of fantasy, mostly because escapism is so necessary right now. And I also consume a wide range of critical thinkers. I will consume literally anything Hannah Fry puts out and she has a lot of nuanced reporting on AI. But right now, my biggest gripe is the fashion industry keeps making promises that AI will solve over production and sizing and fit issues and errors along the supply chain. But right now, all I see are tools for them to sell us more at a faster rate. Just like the rise of drop shipping and Alibaba boutique stores of the 2010s where everyone started selling their own screen printed t-shirts or off-the-shoulder tops because they had just enough capital for one wholesale order. I think we’ll quickly see another rise of this with AI. Like anybody with access to CAD can mock up a quick DTC style store. They throw in some good marketing with Instagram ads and people will fall for it all over again. And if you’re going directly from the computer to a manufacturer and then a customer, it will likely result in more errors we can ever fathom. Fashion will always rely on a hands-on approach when it comes to design and functionality. I think we’re at a really weird impass right now. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to participate in AI in any way. Right now, we desperately need safety and guard rails for this technology, but companies are well aware it’s either adapt or fall behind. For small businesses, I can absolutely see how much money some of these tools can save in production, catching flaws before you go to testing and saving money on the front end. A lot of these tools are just enhancements to programs that have already been in place for years, and they can potentially help smaller creators and designers, but it’s the bigger companies with the cash flow that are implementing all of this all at once to dominate and squash the smaller creators before they even get footing or buy them up before they even become competition. I’ll leave you with this one last note, but one thing I find so interesting about all the fashion books I’ve read lately is they all sort of end on a note of what’s hopeful for the future. The last one I read was Fashionopoulos. It literally ends talking about rental clothing and the rise of recycled clothing, but no real mentions of AI. I I honestly don’t think this is like an intentional correlation. She does mention the brand Milo, which is lab grown leather, uh, which is in part funded by Peter Teal’s founder fund. So, yeah, it just like it all leads back to it, you know. But the book was published in 2019. So, that just shows how quickly this timeline has sped up and the conversation is shifting so rapidly. While I was writing this, Vogue Business published a whole series on AI and fashion. And shocker, most of it was positive. I think as it stands right now, humans will still be connected in one way or another to the creative process. And it might even see the rise of independent brands that show the craft and individuality. But your average everyday person won’t be their customer. Most people just want simplicity. And that alone, I think, will continue to drive these quick, efficient, AIdriven brands. and it certainly won’t help with everything looking the same. That is it for today’s video. I do have all of my sources linked down below. I’m going to put a star next to a couple of the pieces that I thought were just really interesting reads. The Warren Buffett one, that was just an awesome, awesome read. So, yeah, there’s a couple that I highly recommend, but as always, if you want to check my sources, they’re down below.