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Dear BoF Community,
Welcome to Tech Mode, your monthly roundup of the tech-fashion news you need to know.
First, in just a few weeks The Business of Fashion will be hosting its 10th annual VOICES conference, with a number of speakers readers of this newsletter will want to hear from. There’s tech thinker and author Azeem Azhar, who explores the societal impact of emerging technologies; Phoebe Gates (daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates) and Sophia Kianni, founders of the AI shopping startup Phia; and Laura Nestler, who leads the community team at Reddit. You can check out the full speaker lineup here. You won’t want to miss it.
I also wanted to pause a moment to note the death last week of Benoît Pagotto, who co-founded the virtual sneaker and fashion label RTFKT that Nike acquired in 2021 and then shuttered last year. Benoît was a BoF 500 member and spoke at our technology summit in 2022. I interviewed him a few times over the years and always found him to be brimming with ideas and opinions he was never afraid to share.
In this edition, we’re looking at one company publicly distancing itself from AI content, a few others cozying up to AI’s biggest consumer platform, what a powerful new tool for AI-generated videos means for brand copyrights and how US president Donald Trump’s H-1B visa fee could impact fashion.
Let’s do it.
No AI for me, thanks: Aerie, the American Eagle-owned intimates and activewear brand, drew a line in the digital sand last week. “In 2014 we stopped retouching. Today we commit: No AI-generated bodies or people,” the brand proclaimed in an Instagram post. “Real people only.” For good measure, it followed up with another post featuring a video of humans doing random human things like laughing and being silly to emphasise the point.
The upside: Aerie’s stance is proving popular, at least as measured on Instagram. Its first post on the topic has more than 40,000 likes and nearly 600 comments, several times its typical engagement on the platform.
There’s little downside for the brand in coming out against AI at this stage. It aligns with the image it has cultivated as a brand that shows “real” women, meaning not just airbrushed models. Though amid the positive comments, a few said the brand had moved away from showing an inclusive range of models and could do even more expanded sizing beyond XL.
Diverging factions: This is far from the first instance of AI backlash, but to date that backlash has come from consumers. Brands such as Mango and H&M have already begun using AI-generated models and been harangued at times by followers decrying the many problems of generative AI. Aerie flipped the roles, aligning itself with the anti-AI crew.
It’s unlikely to be the last to do so. Fashion could split into two camps: Brands actively using AI-generated imagery, and those rejecting it. They’ll position themselves accordingly. On the one hand will be those that say they embrace innovation and new ideas, on the other those that frame themselves as humanist and authentic — at least until AI becomes so ubiquitous that nobody cares anymore. Of course, many more brands will probably quietly use AI to create content and say nothing one way or another.
Video maker: For brands that do want to generate content with AI, it’s only getting easier. Late last month, OpenAI announced Sora 2, an update to its Sora AI video generator. Compared to its predecessor, it’s “more physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable than prior systems,” the company said at the time.
In fact, the app was so capable of producing realistic videos that users who got access to the invite-only app immediately began producing clips featuring copyrighted characters like SpongeBob or Nintendo’s Mario and generating deepfakes of historical figures and celebrities.
Brands beware: Companies may get excited at the thought of being able to quickly and cheaply create videos for marketing, but these other uses highlight a risk. Users can just as easily misappropriate a brand’s copyrights and put its products into videos it might not appreciate. The larger and more famous a brand or item, the bigger a target it is. There’s a reason Hermès’ Birkin was the subject of an NFT project that eventually led the French luxury house to bring its creator, Mason Rothschild, to court.
Mad actors: Since introducing Sora 2, OpenAI has been forced to put up guardrails. Earlier this month, it said it would allow copyright owners to request that Sora block users from recreating their characters, though it noted it wouldn’t allow blanket opt-outs. On Monday it also started cracking down on deepfakes after actor Brian Cranston and the large actors’ union SAG-AFTRA started voicing their complaints.
Fashion products aren’t going to be as attractive to copyright infringers as animated characters, but brands with recognisable items and logos may nonetheless want to keep their eyes on the AI videos popping up across the internet, in case they need to put in a request to OpenAI.
Check me out: Of course, many are probably looking to stay on OpenAI’s good side. The AI power player made big news a few weeks ago when it announced a new feature letting users complete checkout on items directly in ChatGPT. Companies it has already partnered with include Shopify, Etsy and Walmart, meaning shoppers will be able to buy a huge number of products from these platforms — and from the brands selling on them — directly in their ChatGPT conversations. OpenAI also introduced a feature to allow apps to function in ChatGPT as well, with its first partners including Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify and Zillow.
Baby steps: Shopping directly on AI platforms is still in its infancy. In September, a team of researchers published a paper looking at how people use ChatGPT, analysing 1.1 million conversations between May 2024 and July 2025. Just 2.1 percent of all those conversations involved seeking information on purchasable products, and that’s on the largest AI answer platform. There’s even less traffic, and thus less shopping, on platforms like Perplexity.
Growing up: The expectation, however, is that traffic to tools like ChatGPT will continue to grow, and as people use them for everything from homework to planning trips, they’ll inevitably begin shopping more on them as well. Even if a small slice of users are shopping, that can still be a significant number. The researchers who studied ChatGPT’s use estimated that 700 million users were collectively sending 18 billion messages to ChatGPT each week by July 2025.
Brands are already thinking about how they appear in AI results, creating a rush to improve their AI optimisation and spawning a cottage industry of startups like Botify, Profound and Scrunch AI to help them. The move by OpenAI gives consumers more reason to think of ChatGPT as a place to shop and not just get answers.
H-1B drama: Trump’s recently announced $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications has created panic in tech, an industry that relies heavily on these visas, but fashion and beauty will feel the impact as well. My colleague Michael Sykes, who writes the excellent newsletter The Kicks You Wear for BoF — sign up! — took a look through publicly available data and found several companies with a significant number of workers on H-1Bs. Nike was the leader with 268, but Nordstrom, Gap and many others also had high numbers of H-1B workers.
Talent pool: The most common jobs for which fashion companies got H-1B visas were engineering roles. The industry has become increasingly reliant on technology, whether that’s simple websites and apps for selling online or sophisticated AI for jobs like optimising forecasting. Fashion brands are competing for tech talent with everyone else so it makes sense that a number of companies would need foreign workers to fill some of those roles. But they also used the visas for all sorts of other positions, like production managers and designers.
Cost prohibitive: As Mike points out in the story, a brand like Nike can eat these fees no problem, though that doesn’t always mean they will. Bloomberg reported this week that Walmart — a behemoth with deep pockets — has paused job offers to candidates requiring an H-1B visa. Among the big retail chains, it’s the largest user of H-1Bs, with an estimated 2,390 employees on the visa.
These new fees are even more challenging for smaller companies. They only apply to new visa requests, so current employees shouldn’t be affected, but with technology playing a growing role in fashion businesses, even small brands may find themselves in a hiring crunch. They could face situations where they can’t find local talent, and they can’t afford to hire abroad either. The Trump administration walked back some of its requirements this week, saying the fee would only apply to applicants outside the US, not those already in the country.