Fashion bosses back AI as their staff fear for their jobs
Scroll through LinkedIn and you will see fashion bosses talking up AI as the next industry growth lever. But turn to their teams, and the picture becomes less rosy.
A Vogue Business survey of over 300 fashion professionals found 43 per cent feel ‘positive’ or ‘very positive’ about AI’s future impact on their careers.
Thirty two per cent feel ‘negative’ or ‘very negative’, while 25 per cent are neutral.
Optimism rises with seniority, with half of fashion business owners or chief executives seeing the technology as a competitive advantage, compared to 21 per cent who deem it as a threat.
More than half say it will help them scale.
When looking at younger professionals, however, industry members are more likely to point to fears around job losses or ethics, as well as concerns over diminished creativity.
Those concerns seem lost as you look higher up the food chain, where more experienced respondents described the tool as a way to free up time, and supposedly ‘future proof’ their business.
That split, both generational and hierarchical, is becoming a management issue as well as just a cultural one.
Karen Harvey, chief executive of recruitment firm Karen Harvey Consulting: “A lot of the fear among fashion employees at the moment stems from just having no idea about what’s going on – poor communication, essentially”.
Filippo Bianchi, BCG’s global head of luxury, added: “Senior leadership needs to be very clear and very pragmatic on where the company draws the line”.
Once those boundaries are set, he argued, firms can create “a sandbox where its use can be checked and measured as you go along”.
Efficiency vs headcount
Among employees, job displacement remains by far the biggest anxiety. Yet none of the senior respondents of the Vogue admitted that replacing workers was a current or intended use of AI.
Instead, leaders cite automating admin, research, budgeting and campaign testing, tasks which are necessary, but low value.
Anu Madgavkar, partner at McKinsey Global Institute, said: “The question for C-suite leadership to decide on is what we do with human capacity. Are we going to trim down costs by shedding people, or capture this value by training and using people to do things that we couldn’t do earlier, like spending more time with customers”.
In the UK, the creative industries contributed £125bn to the economy in 2024, and supported over two and a half million jobs, according to a report led by Baroness Beeban Kindron.
That same report claims a third of creative jobs have already been lost to AI, and that 99 per cent of members surveyed believe their work has been scraped without consent.
Meanwhile, another report suggests generative AI could automate up to 26 per cent of tasks across arts, media and entertainment, while 75 per cent of creative professionals saying they already find it useful for editing and research.
For many UK fashion firms, especially SMEs, capability and skills have become key practical hurdles.
Industry data shows 71 per cent of UK firms invested in AI tools in 2025, yet 40 per cent of SMEs admit they lack the in-house expertise to actually manage them.
Riaz Moola, founder of Hyperiondev, says the gap is widening. “The UK market is reaching a point of stagnation because we’ve focused too much on the ‘AI as a tool’ narrative, and not enough on ‘AI as an architected system”.
“We know that people drive strategy, we don’t expect technology to do that”, says Harvey
While fashion boardrooms appear to be largely sold on the idea, their workforces appear to be more apprehensive.