In 2021, Balenciaga’s collaboration with video game Fortnite, led by Demna, functioned as a significant moment for high fashion entering gaming with luxury “skins”, too. In the same year, Gucci, under Michele, debuted a two-week virtual art collection within Roblox through its Gucci Garden metaverse retail flagship, a brand-building exercise geared toward younger Gen Z consumers. In 2022, Burberry launched Burberry: Freedom to Go Beyond, a collaboration with video game Minecraft that comprised an in-game branded experience, alongside a capsule collection of its most popular products, including its Heritage Trench Coat, in a creative experiment the brand said “embodies our affinity for the natural world and the limitless potential for adventure it holds”. Between 2022 and 2024, Prada released several “timecapsule” NFT collections via Ethereum blockchain, in what it called its “creative presence in Web3”.
In 2023, after a decade at the helm of Loewe, Jonathan Anderson played on the idea of blurring the digital with the physical, while flipping the concept on its head, when he presented his SS23 Pixel collection. The capsule, spanning menswear and womenswear, featured a trompe l’oeil effect that made its clothing and Puzzle bag appear as if they were low-res digital items, IRL.
Fashion’s metaverse and NFT experiments were short-lived, however, as hype dwindled. An often-cited example of the peak of the craze was Dolce & Gabbana’s The Doge Crown NFT, a jewel-encrusted crown that sold for over $1.2 million, as part of their landmark digital fashion collection in 2021. “This became the symbol of luxury’s early Web3 gold rush, signaling the end of the Web3 NFT bubble in fashion,” Young says.
As metaverse hype waned, what followed has largely been a return to embracing craftsmanship. The undeniable explosion of generative AI, though, has reverted attention back to tech and how it intersects with the industry.
Early clues
There have been a handful of digital creative experiments in the last few months that offer an early indication of which houses could appear more tech-forward under their new creative directors. Unsurprisingly, it’s the same names cropping up. So far, the loudest creative exploration of AI has come from Michele’s latest home, Valentino, via the launch of a nine-part digital art series showcasing the Garavani DeVain bag he introduced as part of his pre-fall 2025 collection, posted to the brand’s social media.
The house has been transparent about when the artists used AI to create their pieces, and described the vision behind the project as an “ongoing dialog between human creativity and digital experimentation, reaffirming the value of artistic collaboration as an authentic expression of contemporaneity.”
The works in question were surreal and dared to lean into AI’s tendency toward visual entropy — the uncanny valley that has been labeled “slop.” They were divisive, having met with social media critique, as has been the case with every brand’s experiments with AI visuals in the past year. But more broadly, the Valentino campaign showed us how customers are expecting labels to adopt a stance on their use of AI that fits with their wider brand values. They also precipitated a discussion around whether embracing AI entropy — leaning into glitch as a creative act — could be fashion’s next visual language in 2026.