Fashion always reflects the zeitgeist, and the rapid development of AI is one of the main cultural conversations in 2025. Brands are deeply split on how to approach it: some are countering it by emphasizing craft and investing in IRL community world-building events, while others are claiming early adopter status via customer-facing AI stylists and shopping tools. Should luxury reject AI as the antithesis of its values, or lean into the unknown? Nowhere is fashion’s AI neurosis felt stronger than when it comes to creative campaigns.
Valentino’s recent digital art ad for its DeVain bag is a case in point. This week, the brand dropped the sixth artwork in a nine-part series of visual stories dedicated to its Garavani DeVain shoulder bag, which the brand describes as “a starting point for a reflection of contemporary creativity, reimagined through the digital medium as a form of artistic expression”. The artwork in question, by multi-disciplinary artist Christopher Royal King (alias @TotalEmotionalAwareness), is a trippy AI-generated animation that blends pop-surreal imagery of rock concert crowds with motifs from the bag’s design, their forms bending out of shape and dissolving into one another to an ambient soundscape. It’s a bold play on the most common criticism of AI imagery: its tendency toward entropy, or rather, “AI slop”. Cue a social media backlash criticizing the artwork as exactly that.
Scrolling through the thousands of comments from consumers and creatives on the brand’s Instagram post of King’s piece, most of the critique centers around the idea that the artwork sits at odds with what people would expect from a luxury house. But that’s exactly the point.
“I didn’t want to simulate luxury — I wanted to record it, distort it optically, archive it emotionally and let the rest of the questions hover without needing immediate answers,” says King. The artist combined photographs from his book library of 25 years as a touring musician with 3D scans, photographs and films he took of the physical bags using primitive cameras, including a plastic Fisher‑Price PXL‑2000 toy camera. This achieved analog imperfections and glitches that he says served as “intriguing source material” with “unexpected texture and motion” to initially feed into the AI. Tape compression, tracking noise, color bleed and smeared motion “created a kind of honesty that feels archival and uncanny — the exact territory I wanted to explore”, King says, explaining that he then fed this material into the AI model and then back into the analog cameras to create a feedback loop.