The campaign was directed by Jordan Wolfson, the Los Angeles-based artist whose work has made him one of contemporary art’s most persistent flashpoints. His 2014 piece Female Figure, a robotic sculpture that dances to pop music while staging an unsettling tableau of misogyny, established his appetite for provocation. But it is Real Violence that remains his most notorious feat: A viewer dons a virtual-reality headset and noise-cancelling headphones to watch, for 2½ minutes, a man being beaten with a baseball bat until his head bursts open in grotesque, unflinching detail.
So, why did the Italian powerhouse engage the provocateur? The answer is likely the same reason it has long courted creatives, intellectuals and filmmakers over conventional advertising directors — Yorgos Lanthimos, Wes Anderson and Ridley Scott have all passed through its orbit. Wolfson, in that sense, is a logical conclusion: a visual practitioner whose entire practice interrogates the relationship between the viewer, body and image. Fashion, at its most self-serious, asks similar questions.
At first, Prada’s avian dream seems genuinely disquieting, arresting in all the right ways. Until, that is, it admitted that AI was deployed in the campaign’s post-production, even though a 50-person crew had filmed the interactions between the stars — including Nicholas Hoult, Liu Wen and Hunter Schafer — alongside their feathered alter egos. The white room, suddenly, looked a great deal less profound.
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However, not everyone was reaching for the pitchforks. Style critic Rachel Tashjian extolled the film for its meaningful imagery, even as she signed off her post with “I hate AI” in the same breath. Runway news platform The Impression praised Wolfson’s intervention as a “controlled disruption”, a visionary bending the machinery of fashion towards his own language, even though it conceded that the intellectual ambition risked tipping into emotional coolness. The reception was less warm elsewhere, with portrait photographer Jack Davison cutting straight to it beneath the brand’s post: “Oh great! More AI that no one is asking for.”
The timing could hardly have been worse. After years of price hikes that strained the relationship between luxury labels and their customers, companies can ill afford to be seen cutting corners. The responses have been telling. Last December, Valentino’s attempt to frame its AI-generated DeVain handbag footage as a “digital creative project” — featuring surreal reels of models morphing into logos and bodies dissolving into kaleidoscopic swirls — was met with immediate fury.
Its comment section was filled with words like “cheap”, “lazy” and, most devastatingly for a couture house, “embarrassing”.
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Gucci, too, drew criticism after it used AI to generate imagery to promote its show at Milan Fashion Week. “Bleak days when Gucci can’t find a real human Milanese grandmother to wear an outfit from 1976,” said one commenter, responding to a picture of a glamorous older woman draped in fur. Another prodded,
“If the products are made for real people, in real life, why create a world that doesn’t even exist? Great brands don’t need shortcuts. They need the truth.”
No matter how intentional Gucci was in its execution, disruption only works when the audience is in on the joke. And consumers in 2026 — already bruised by a slow erosion in craft and quality that outpaced any justification for their continued loyalty — were in no mood to be asked to do the interpretive work.
The remarkable thing was that Gucci and Valentino had disclosed their digital methods up front, but it made no difference — the backlash only intensified when the latter posted a second AI film, prompting one follower to ask: “More after the feedback on the first one???” Prada, in contrast, said nothing, and still faced the same verdict. Hiring an artist of Wolfson’s standing — who has argued that generative systems are merely an instrument, and the vision still entirely his own — provided no defence either.
What the industry has yet to reconcile itself to is how seriously it needs to govern machine learning, rather than hoping the next collaboration is prestigious enough to deflect scrutiny. There are signs that some groups are trying.
French conglomerate Kering recently appointed its first-ever AI chief, Pierre Houlès, tasked with embedding the technology across its stable of houses — Gucci, Balenciaga and others — with a mandate to enhance both performance and, tellingly, desirability.
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The appointment reflects a broader shift: Ralph Lauren, Lululemon and even Marks & Spencer have made comparable hires in the last two years, as fashion enters a more disciplined phase with new titles to match the moment. It follows a pattern the industry knows well: After the pandemic and the reckoning sparked by Black Lives Matter, brands rushed to appoint sustainability leads and diversity managers as a way of signalling that values had a seat at the table. The implicit acknowledgement, then as now, is that goodwill cannot be improvised. It has to be built into the structure. What Prada’s scaled humanoids suggest is that great art is not a substitute for knowing what your consumer needs, or what you risk taking away from them.
Perhaps what nobody wants to admit is that the ceiling of technology has not been tested yet, only the floor: how quickly it can produce something; how cheaply it can fill a content calendar and how it can simulate a creative decision without requiring one. Used cynically, AI is a blank canvas that produces the illusion of a painting. Used honestly, it may yet produce things that could not have been painted at all.
Fashion has survived every technology that was supposed to flatten it, from the sewing machine to Photoshop and CGI, and each found its place in the hands of someone who refused to be boring with it. What matters, in the end, is not the tool, but the conviction behind it, whether it sharpens a point of view or simply smoothens everything into a homogenous, frictionless blur.
