Efficiency over imagination

“AI is not slowing down, it’s not going anywhere,” said Emma Grace Bailey, Director of Sustainability at Future Snoops during the recent Active Creation in the Age of AI webinar. “It’s projected to add between 150 and 275 billion dollars to the apparel, fashion and luxury sectors by 2028, which is only three years away.”

“While the machine isn’t slowing down,” she asked, “maybe we are. What if the real threat isn’t AI taking over, but us stepping back?”

Bailey reflected on how the industry’s creative energy has changed. “We haven’t been as creative as we once were,” she stated. Outsourcing, the new trend cycle, and the constant pressure to deliver have flattened creativity completely over the last decades.

“Our deadlines push us towards the safest option, repackaging what worked before rather than trying something new,” she continued. “We’ve mistaken recycling for creating.”

Today’s designers, she noted, are producing at algorithmic speed to feed the demands of ultra fast fashion and AI-assisted design. The result is sameness, a system optimised for efficiency, not imagination.

“Every leap in technology promised freedom for creativity, but each one made us faster, not freer. AI really is our final test. It can drown us in repetition or it can unleash a new creative evolution,” Bailey stated.

The question, Bailey argued, is not what AI can do, but what humans decide to do with it. “The future of creativity won’t be decided by algorithms,” she said. “It will be decided by the humans who still care enough to imagine.”

Lilly Berelovich, Co-Founder and Chief Future Vision Officer at Future Snoops, agreed, describing human intuition, imagination and emotion as the qualities that make creativity truly irreplaceable. “Let’s be more human than the machines we’ve been practising ourselves to be for far too many years,” she said.

The Creatorship Era: AI as a creative amplifier

Bailey explained that the Creatorship Era allows humans to focus on curiosity, imagination and emotion. In the words of Berelovich, these are 'all those things that live on the right side of our brain that we can’t quite measure, but we can feel them more'.

Bailey pointed to several brands that already demonstrate what this balance between instinct and intelligence can look like in practice.

At L’Oréal, a partnership with IBM’s Gen AI is transforming product innovation. The company uses predictive models to simulate new formulations virtually, testing ingredient combinations that once took years to perfect. “Their aim is to unlock innovation territories much faster than human R&D alone could,” Bailey said. The system allows teams to identify viable, sustainable materials early in the process and reduce waste in testing, combining data precision with human sustainability goals.

For designer Norma Kamali, who partnered with Meson Meta, AI is being used to preserve. The designer has trained a custom model entirely on her own archive, feeding it thousands of images spanning decades of design. “For her, the aim isn't to replace the human creative at all, but to support them in really carrying on the brand's legacy,” Bailey noted.

At Puma, Bailey highlighted the Inverse sneaker, a design conceived with an AI co-pilot. The system drew from Puma’s archive, including the brand’s historic Inhale silhouette, and then pushed the boundaries of design beyond what traditional prototyping might allow. “The result is a hybrid product that connects the brand’s past with its future,” Bailey explained. “It’s a collaboration between precision and imagination.”

Finally, the global trend forecasting company introduced Muse, an AI agent designed to accelerate and enrich the creative process, drawing exclusively from Future Snoops’ own curated database.

Sources:
- AI tools were used for transcribing and writing assistance.