You Can’t Automate Taste: Why Fashion Still Needs the Human Eye in the Age of AI

In a March 2024 interview on the Morning Brew Daily podcast, Mark Zuckerberg remarked that in the future, launching a brand could be as simple as connecting a bank account to Meta and letting AI handle the rest. His exact words: "In the future, maybe someone will just come to us with a bank account, and we can give them customers." It was meant to illustrate the full automation of marketing, from targeting to transaction, made possible by artificial intelligence. The idea is both thrilling and dystopian. It paints a picture of a world where algorithms control not just who sees a product, but who buys it, when, and at what price, with minimal human intervention.

In tech, this is seen as efficiency. In fashion, it might be the death of desire. Because even if Meta can sell the product, who shapes the feeling behind it? Who defines the why?

So what can and can't AI do in fashion?

The Automation Dream (and Its Limits)

The fashion industry is undergoing rapid transformation due to AI. From virtual try-ons to generative fashion design, new tools are streamlining nearly every step of the customer journey. AI-generated models now appear in lookbooks, smart systems deliver targeted ads in real time, and machine learning algorithms are even designing clothing. The appeal of automation is obvious: scale, speed, and seamless experiences. Imagine a world where AI chooses the fabric, designs the cut, generates a model image, writes the product description, launches an ad, and adjusts pricing dynamically, all before a human touches the product. For some, this future is a dream.

But in this highly efficient system, something vital is lost. Fashion isn’t just about functionality. It’s about feeling. The magic of fashion lies in the ineffable, the inspiration behind a collection, the narrative of a brand, and the emotional resonance of an outfit.

What AI Gets Right

AI isn’t the villain. It has already brought massive value to fashion across multiple areas:

• Trend Prediction: By analyzing massive datasets from Instagram, TikTok, Google, and e-commerce platforms, AI can identify emerging styles faster than human trend forecasters ever could.

• Personalized Recommendations: Machine learning can now deliver hyper-targeted suggestions based on past purchases, browsing history, body measurements, and even mood (improving both conversion rates and customer satisfaction.)

• Generative Content: AI can write product descriptions, generate campaign imagery, and create styling suggestions, reducing the creative burden for brands.

• Visual Search: Shoppers can now upload a photo and instantly find similar items across platforms (a feature that aligns beautifully with impulse-driven fashion habits.)

• Digital Twin Models: Virtual avatars based on a consumer’s real-world body measurements allow for realistic, personalized try-on experiences (bridging the gap between e-commerce and physical retail.)

All of this makes fashion more efficient, accessible, and user-friendly. But there's a difference between delivering a product and shaping a cultural moment.

That’s where AI still falls short, and will for a while, if you ask me.

What AI Still Can’t Do

Despite its growing capabilities, AI lacks what makes fashion so culturally powerful: context, creativity, and intuition.

1. Emotional Resonance

Fashion is deeply emotional, like the way an outfit makes someone feel, confident, powerful, romantic, rebellious, is rarely about the item itself, but about its symbolism. AI might reproduce silhouettes and styles, but it can’t feel the mood of a city, the politics of a subculture, or the ache of nostalgia. It can mimic, but not mean.

2. Cultural Literacy

Fashion thrives on context. Designers reference film, music, politics, art, and history to tell stories through clothing. These references often require a deep understanding of nuanced and localized cultural movements. A generative model trained on global data risks flattening these distinctions, missing the underground in favor of the mainstream.

3. Taste and Timing

Great fashion is often slightly ahead of its time. It balances risk and restraint. It’s not just about what’s trending, it’s about what could trend next. AI, which relies on existing data, tends to reinforce past behavior. Human tastemakers, by contrast, take intuitive leaps. They bet on ideas no algorithm could predict.

4. World-Building and Myth-Making

The most iconic fashion brands don’t just sell clothes, they sell a universe. Think of the quiet luxury of The Row or the baroque eccentricity of Gucci. These brand identities are emotionally constructed and meticulously designed. AI might generate something similar, but it cannot create the mythology that makes a brand irresistible.

Why Fashion Still Needs the Human Eye

AI can help identify patterns, but it can’t define what’s interesting. That’s the work of creatives, designers, stylists, photographers, editors, and founders. These people inject narrative and perspective into fashion, they tell us not just what to wear, but how to feel while wearing it. Creative direction is inherently emotional and culturally attuned. It’s also layered with contradiction and subjectivity, qualities machines struggle with. The ability to sense when restraint is more powerful than extravagance, or when irony is more effective than clarity, comes from lived experience, not logic.

As fashion becomes increasingly digital, the human eye becomes even more essential, not less.

The Future Is Hybrid, Not Replaced

AI will not replace fashion creatives. It will empower them. The most exciting future isn’t one where machines take over taste, but one where they enhance it.

Imagine a creative director who uses AI to prototype 50 looks in minutes, or a solo founder who builds a dynamic e-commerce platform using automated product tagging and smart copywriting tools. In this hybrid model, AI handles the mechanics, leaving humans more time for vision. This is how the best fashion-forward startups will win: by combining data with daring. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or digital twin models will be part of the new creative stack, but the soul of the brand must still come from people.

Zuckerberg may imagine a world where brands run on autopilot. But fashion is not software. It's closer to cinema, rich with symbolism, risk, and emotion. If AI powers the platform, it’s still humans who write the script.

Final Thought

AI can streamline discovery. It can sort, tag, filter, and suggest with increasing precision. But it cannot invent longing. It cannot generate that subtle, irrational pull, the thing that makes someone fall in love with a garment not because it fits or functions, but because it feels like them. But taste is not about organization, it's about selection. It’s knowing when to break the rules, when to hold back, and when to go all in. Taste is emotional, situational, and often defiant.

Fashion has never been just about clothes. It has always been about identity, community, rebellion, seduction, self-expression. It’s a mood, a message, a portal into the lives we dream of living. And that’s why, no matter how powerful AI becomes, we will always need humans, not just to choose what we wear, but to remind us why it matters.

Sources & Further Reading

• Vogue Business. “The State of Fashion 2024” by McKinsey & Company and The Business of Fashion.

• The New York Times. “Can A.I. Be Too Real?” by Vanessa Friedman.

• Wired. “AI-Generated Fashion Models Are Here — and They're Getting Contracts.”

• Harvard Business Review. “What AI Still Can’t Do” by H. James Wilson & Paul R. Daugherty.

• Dazed Digital. “Digital Twins and the Future of Fashion.”