As artificial intelligence takes on a larger role in shaping fashion, luxury group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton has partnered with France’s leading fashion school to create a research chair devoted to the relationship between all sciences and creation
The conglomerate, which owns brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior and Fendi, has promoted the widespread adoption of AI through every facet of its activities, from directing products to stores to prompting chat messages with clients and helping lawyers draft contracts. Now it aims to better understand how creative minds engage with technology
Sidney Toledano, the veteran LVMH executive who is president of the Institut Français de la Mode, or IFM, said the school already teaches AI to students at all levels, from vocational training to master’s degrees. Around half of its design students use generative AI, he said
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“I think it is the most advanced fashion school in this field,” Toledano told WWD
Having worked with industry heavyweights including John Galliano, Hedi Slimane and Raf Simons during his time as chief executive officer of LVMH Fashion Group and Christian Dior Couture, Toledano sees AI as a new tool for designers, rather than a threat to creativity
While he’s concerned about its potential use by fast-fashion firms to mine the IP and archives of luxury brands while skirting copyright issues, he’s convinced that, utilized correctly, it has the potential to turbocharge imagination
“It should be used to open up new horizons, rather than exploiting what’s already been done to copy it on a mass scale,” he said
The new endowment, worth 150,000 euros a year, will finance fundamental aimed at understanding creative practices, the impact of new tools, and the environments that best support talent development, LVMH said.
James Ewing/Courtesy of IFM
IFM has partnered with Tobias Rees, founder of philosophical R&D lab Limn, to develop advanced models aimed at helping designers generate new insights and ideas. Toledano said the technology requires an expert guiding hand.
“Giving someone with no creativity access to AI is like handing me the fastest Ferrari and asking me to compete in a Grand Prix,” he said. “The more sophisticated the tool, the more you will need exceptionally gifted creatives to get the most out of it.”
New Frontiers
Maud Alvarez-Pereyre, chief human reroach.
“One of the key ambitions of this chair is to better understand how technology and AI in particular can support creation without standardizing it nor reducing the human aspect of it,” she said.
“AI may expand possibilities, accelerate exploration, or open new creative pathways. But it does not replace intention, singularity, or the emotional and cultural depth that human creators bring,” she said
With AI already in wide use across all creative industries, the group wants to make sure it is integrated “responsibly and purposefully,” Alvarez-Pereyre added
Some use cases for genAI include systems that generate collection mood boards or iterate designs in 3D, skipping the need for physical prototypes.
At Paris Couture Week, several designers appeared to grapple with the implications of AI, showing creations that explored extreme shapes and experimental materials.
Daniel Roseberry said his fall 2026 haute couture collection for Schiaparelli, which featured a latex jacket with inflatable tentacles, molded silicone bustiers and gowns that pulsed with light, was partly about “surrendering to this unknown,” though he confessed to feeling ambivalent about computer-assisted design
“I did a visit to a university recently, and I found a lot of AI in the senior projects in the portfolios, and it’s hard to know what to do with that because you don’t feel like you’re getting a reflection of the person that you would be considering for a job,” he said
Stéphane Feugère/Courtesy of LVMH
Toledano, who trained as an engineer, said he was initially skeptical, but was won over by testing a tool that facilitates handbag design, which is already in use at Louis Vuitton. Even LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault has tried it. “He finds it fascinating because it allows you to create new shapes,” Toledano reported. “As you know, he’s passionate about handbags, and we’ve achieved some pretty interesting results with bag designs. But it’s not replacing the company’s actual designers.”
While creative directors still rely on their subjective perceptions of what they see, from people on the street to a label’s archives, the technology may one day influence their observations, he suggested.
“It could be a matter of data. Who’s to say that, in the future, we won’t be feeding databases with street footage, or videos of people exercising or sleeping?” he said
Analyzing Creativity
Arnault, whose family holding company Agache recently invested 50 million euros in a new institute for mathematics and fundamental sciences at École Polytechnique, France’s top engineering school, is also interested in the broader sector implications of AI
“When the subject is creativity itself, how it works, how it evolves, and how it can be supported, we believe it adds significant value to partner with an academic institution such as IFM: it allows us to bring scientific depth, methodological discipline, and intellectual independence to questions that are central to the future of our industry,” said Alvarez-Pereyre
The research chair will focus on three areas: creation and cognition, which examines the origins of creativity; computational design models, or the interaction between man and machine, and the anthropology of design, which delves into the cultural, collective, symbolic and social dimensions of design.
Alvarez-Pereyre said that even if intuition and inspiration are inherently mysterious, that should not mean they’re beyond scientific inquiry.
“Science can help us better understand the conditions in which they emerge: cognitive processes, perceptual mechanisms, memory, gesture, environment and interaction,” she said
“AI will likely become part of the creative environment in which many designers operate. This does not mean design itself will become reducible to AI or is delegated to the machines,” Alvarez-Pereyre added
“What will continue to make the difference is the designer’s eye, their cultural literacy, their sense of proportion, their ability to interpret a brand, and their capacity to create something meaningful and desirable,” she said
Gregoire Avenel/Courtesy IFM Mas
Toledano acknowledged that just as some American college students are protesting against AI, not all students at IFM are favorable to the technology, which is why its use remains optional
“It shouldn’t be forced on them, especially not on creatively gifted young people,” he said.
“If I were 18 and attending university today, I might say, ‘Stop AI, give free rein to human emotion.’ Thought leaders and researchers need to reassure them by showing how the technology can be used in the service of humanity, but it is a subject of debate.”
He believes creative directors at LVMH run no risk of being replaced by AI, but they could well find it soon rivals the human capacity for creative thinking.
“Achieving intelligence that closely resembles human intelligence is not something that will happen overnight, but we will be able to talk about intuition — intuitive intelligence — even in the context of AI,” he predicted
Once AI tools reach those levels of sophistication, he believes even “genius” designers like Galliano will be ready to engage with them.
“The day creatives of John’s caliber start using AI, it will be like the greatest drivers getting behind the wheel of a Ferrari or a Porsche,” Toledano said. “They will infuse AI with emotion to create things that move us, too.”
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