AI in Luxury Fashion: How Brands Are Using It

Blog / AI in Luxury Fashion: How Brands Are Using It

AI in Luxury Fashion: How Brands Are Using It

Blog / AI in Luxury Fashion: How Brands Are Using It

LVMH spent four years building an AI system with Google Cloud, linking data across the group’s 75 maisons, and now powers an internal assistant called MaIA. It’s used by roughly 40,000 employees and handles millions of requests a month. But most people who shop at its stores have never heard of it, and that’s deliberate.

At Tiffany and Louis Vuitton, sales advisors use it to pull up a client’s history and preferences before a conversation even starts. LVMH’s own chief information officer, Franck Le Moal, has described the approach as “quiet tech,” technology built to disappear into the shopping experience.

Across watches, jewellery, fragrance, beauty, apparel, handbags, and footwear, AI gets welcomed into forecasting, quality control, authentication, and customer service without resistance.

How AI Is Changing the Swiss Watch Industry

Ask a Swiss watch executive whether AI belongs in their workshop, and you’ll get a longer pause than you might expect. Deloitte’s Swiss Watch Industry Study, published in October 2025, found that executives rank AI as the second biggest trend shaping their business, just behind the rise of independent watchmakers and ahead of anti-counterfeiting technology.

Swiss watch exports fell 2.8 per cent in 2024, and the volume drop was sharper still: 9 per cent, to 15.3 million pieces. That pressure is exactly why AI looks tempting to component makers and risky to everyone above them. Hublot’s chief product officer, Sadry Keiser, has said machines now work alongside watchmakers at a micron level on tolerance and machining without touching assembly adjustment, decoration, or final evaluation, which stay entirely in human hands. “Speed is not an objective; quality is the quest,” he says.

Rolex CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour has confirmed that AI is increasingly built into the brand’s production line, part of the roughly CHF 100 million a year Rolex spends upgrading machinery, but insists final assembly and every client conversation still belong to a person.

Component makers further down the supply chain are moving faster: 70 per cent plan to invest in automation within a year, mostly for machining, gem-setting and quality control. The closest thing to a customer-facing crack in that wall is Swatch’s AI-DADA, a design tool trained on more than four decades of the brand’s archive that lets a buyer prompt their way to a one-off watch, stamped “1/1” on the case back.

AI Is Helping Jewellery Brands Design Without Replacing Artisans

Jewellery has made the opposite bet. Here, AI is doing real work, and almost nobody wants their finished piece associated with it. Daimanté, a jewellery label that launched in India this February, begins every design with an AI-generated concept, which artisans then interpret and finish by hand. Founder Sunny Kumar Singh described the logic this way: “Technology should expand imagination, not erase human skill. AI allows us to explore forms and ideas that would be difficult to visualize otherwise, but the soul of each piece still comes from the artisan’s hand.”

BLNG, a Paris and Los Angeles-based startup that raised $3 million last year, sells a version of the same idea to bigger houses: turn a sketch into a photorealistic render in seconds using generative AI, cutting out weeks of manual revision, and let the brand present the finished piece exactly as it always has. BLNG has already picked up an LVMH innovation award for the work.

Fragrance Brands and AI for Personalised Scent Discovery

Somewhere between those two postures sits fragrance, which may be the one category where AI gets to talk to the customer directly. Jo Malone London’s AI Scent Advisor, launched in December 2025, is built on Google’s Gemini and Vertex AI. It invites shoppers to describe what they’re looking for in their own words and matches it to the brand’s scent library.

This June, the brand extended the idea to Pinterest with Scent Scanner, which reads a person’s saved boards, including their colours, textures, and the destinations they’ve pinned, and translates that visual language into a fragrance recommendation using the same AI system.

Estée Lauder’s chief digital and marketing officer, Aude Gandon, explained the choice of platform simply: people express what they want in pictures before they can put it into words. Fragrance has always sold on description anyway. Letting a machine do some of that describing barely registers as a compromise.

L'Oréal Brings AI-Powered Beauty Shopping Into ChatGPT

Beauty took a different route into the same problem. L’Oréal skipped building its own AI interface entirely. Its June 2026 partnership with OpenAI puts Maybelline’s virtual makeup try-on tool, built on ModiFace, directly inside ChatGPT.

Lancôme and Kérastase get improved product discovery inside the same chat window. Further behind the scenes, L’Oréal is using OpenAI’s GPT-Rosalind model to map the skin microbiome for La Roche-Posay’s research pipeline. The bet is straightforward: don’t wait for the customer to come to your app when they are already talking to someone else’s AI.

AI in Fashion: Why the Biggest Impact May Be on the Workforce

Most coverage of AI in fashion design has focused on what a computer can generate. The BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 report points to something less glamorous: the workforce. By 2030, generative AI and related technologies could automate up to 30 per cent of employee time in fashion and retail across Europe and the US. Ninety-two per cent of executives surveyed say they’re increasing AI spending. Just under 1 per cent say their AI capability is operating at real scale.

Handbags have found the one job AI can do that no artisan ever could: verify, at a microscopic level, whether something is what it claims to be. Entrupy, founded in 2012, uses an AI-powered imaging device to compare a bag’s stitching, hardware, and material against a database of authenticated pieces and claims 99.1 per cent accuracy. The company has scanned bags worth an estimated 1.8 billion euros and flagged 9.6 per cent of them as fakes.

The RealReal built its own AI tool, called Vision, which now reviews around half of all handbag listings on the platform. Chief Merchandising Officer Samantha McCandless has said the system gets sharper the more inventory runs through it. eBay’s own Authenticity Guarantee program, which combines expert review with technology, has inspected 15 million items since September 2025.

Footwear ended up with the most visibly futuristic AI of any category here. Volumental, a Stockholm company founded in 2012, has built a database of more than 66 million 3D foot scans, gathered through scanners installed in over 3,000 stores across 60-plus countries.

New Balance, Hoka, Red Wing Shoes, Ecco, FootJoy, and Fleet Feet all use the system to match customers to sizes an off-the-shelf chart could never predict accurately.

In June, 3D-printing company Zellerfeld folded Volumental into its own manufacturing pipeline, feeding scan data straight into a system that prints shoes to the exact contours of an individual foot. Zellerfeld’s founder and CEO, Cornelius Schmitt, said the company evaluated every credible foot-scanning option in the world before choosing Volumental, calling the precision of its scans exactly what custom 3D printing requires.

Luxury has decided, brand by brand, that AI can do the measuring, the matching, the checking, and the sorting as long as it never claims to have made anything.