People are ticked off regarding Selkie’s use of AI in their Valentine’s Day release, and I have to say, I can see their point! (Also, cupid, again? What is up with these dramatic “love-inspired” releases for 2024?)

Selkie made a creative, design choice. A big choice that may not have been the wisest decision for their brand reputation. As of three days after the announcement, the comment section is not pleased by the decision to use AI-developed patterns for their fabric instead of human artists to develop patterns for their newest crop of iconic dresses. 

Now, right off the bat for me, I can see a contradiction in this decision just from an aesthetic standpoint. Selkie is a dress brand that took off in popularity in 2020, selling fantasy puff romantic dresses that evoke another time. They are fanciful, sometimes with corsetted bodices, other times they have high regency waistlines, but mostly they look like a dress to galavant around Versailles in with Marie Antoinette. They are not modern in the dream they sell, they have an intrinsic historical imagination. 

They are princess dresses. Ladies of prestige in the modern time when none of them feel like princesses. Since the 1990s, we have seen a steep decline in formal fashion in our day-to-day life. Case in point, billionaire tech boys wear hoodies and t-shirts, not suits and hats like Carnegie and Vanderbilt. In 2020, this came to a head as remote work and social distancing created a new space of absolute nothingness when it came to fashion.

What was the point? You could wear pajamas and as long as you weren’t on a Zoom call, who would know? It was negligible. With face coverings, makeup became superfluous. Selkie, cottage-core, dark academia, etc. These movements in fashion revealed something deeper in our collective psyche. Although wearing pajamas and hanging out on our couches seemed like a dream, in reality, we were missing the fantasy of spectacle and splendor. Selkie is the typification of this. 

AI pops the dream bubble. Suddenly the clouds of tulle and puff sleeves that carried us into a dream world of palaces, picnics, and girlhood, evaporate underneath us and the lifestyle falls back to reality. As much as AI sells a dream of fantasy, it is a tool of reality. The reality of cutting corners, fast fashion, and jobs being cut from creatives is to cut costs because AI is cheaper. But cheaper is not always cheerful. In the case of a lot of AI art and AI work, you are getting what you pay for. It’s not the real deal, something is just a bit off. 

I’ve watched several videos in 2023 of creators I watch putting AI to the test, and in each case when it came to AI having to work in our space, in the humanities, it couldn’t hang. The results were surreal, not real. In these videos, AI was used to interpret history, recreate art in a historical style, create portraits in photography, show examples of historical dress, and give advice on how to give yourself a makeover. In each experiment, the AI was not able to replicate the human experience and seemed to get confused by things involving the story of humans. 

With Selkie’s historical aesthetic being a key to its branding, it is not surprising to me that AI seems out of the aesthetic wheelhouse. This is an interesting reaction to me because it has appeared since the turn of the 20th century that we as humans have been lusting over technology as the ultimate fantasy until we have it and then the intoxication fades away like blood alcohol and late-night attraction. 

It is an interesting time for fashion brands for sure because I think this may be the era that humanness and authenticity to the world the brand is selling may prove to be more valuable than gold. I appreciate the commitment to humanness and personal ethics that consumers are voicing. Especially when it comes to human artists. We can’t change the fact that AI is a thing and it is easy to replace humans with technology, all we can do is voice our opinion and make choices based on what we believe.

I’ve looked through the comments on Selkie’s newest release and there were echoes of disappointment and displeasure from consumers, a lot of them being artists themselves. There was a different tone in these comments than the commonplace cancel culture of our current age, there was genuine sadness. Like when a parent isn’t mad, just disappointed.

The criticism was delivered respectfully but firmly. This gave me hope that we can begin discussing things online with more frankness and kindness than in recent years. If you are a big proponent of AI, I ask dear reader that you don’t take my thoughts on the subject of AI personally. Maybe you can be the one to show us all what makes it great? 🙂