At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly penetrating all areas of the economy, the creative industry is facing a decisive change. Designers, brands and companies must redefine how they use their creative energy. During the webinar Active Creation in the Age of AI Emma Grace Bailey and Lilly Berelovich from the trend research agency Future Snoops show that technology does not replace but can enhance human imagination and intuition.
Bailey, Director of Sustainability at Future Snoops, explained during the webinar that AI is not going away. She pointed out that it is forecast to contribute between $150 billion and $275 billion (around €130 billion to €239 billion) to the apparel, fashion and luxury sectors by 2028 – and that this development is just three years away. “The machine isn’t slowing down, but maybe we are,” she warned. “What if the real threat isn’t the AI takeover, but our own withdrawal?”
Bailey reflected on how the industry’s creative energy has changed over time. She noted that people today are no longer as creative as they used to be. Outsourcing, the fast trend cycle and the constant pressure to deliver have significantly flattened creativity in the last few decades.
“Our deadlines push us toward the safest option. We repackage what already worked rather than trying something truly new,” she continued. “We confused recycling with creating.”
Today’s designers, she noted, work at algorithmic speed. They serve the needs of ultra fast fashion and AI-supported design. The result is uniformity – a system optimized for efficiency, not imagination.
“Every leap in technology promised freedom for creativity, but each only made us faster, not freer. AI is truly our final test. It can drown us in repetition or spark a new creative evolution,” Bailey explained.
The crucial question is not what AI can do, but how people use it, she argued. “The future of creativity will not be decided by algorithms,” she said. “It is determined by those who still care enough to imagine something.”
Berelovich, co-founder and chief future vision officer at Future Snoops, agreed. She emphasized that human intuition, imagination and emotion are the qualities that make creativity truly irreplaceable. “Let us be more human than the machines we have been training to be for far too many years,” she said.
Bailey explained that the Creatorship Era gives people the opportunity to focus on curiosity, imagination and emotions. In Berelovich’s words, these are “all the things that live in the right hemisphere of the brain, which we can’t quite measure, but which we can feel all the more.”
She pointed to several brands that are already showing what this balance between instinct and intelligence can look like in practice.
At the French cosmetics company L’Oréal, a partnership with Gen AI from the US technology group IBM is changing product innovation. The company uses predictive models to virtually simulate new formulations and test drug combinations that previously took years to perfect. “Their goal is to open up areas of innovation much faster than human research and development alone could,” Bailey said. The system helps teams identify usable and sustainable materials early and reduces waste in testing, combining data precision with human sustainability goals.
For American designer Norma Kamali, who works with Meson Meta, AI serves to preserve her creative legacy. She trained a custom model using only her own archive, feeding in thousands of images spanning decades of her work. “For them, it’s not about replacing creatives at all, but rather helping them really carry on the legacy of the brand,” Bailey noted.
At German sporting goods manufacturer Puma, Bailey highlighted the “Inverse” sneaker, a design developed in collaboration with an AI co-pilot. The system drew on the Puma archive, including the brand’s historic “Inhale” silhouette, and then pushed the boundaries of design beyond what traditional prototyping would have allowed. “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, global trend research company introduced Muse. Muse is an AI agent designed to accelerate and enrich the creative process, using only the database curated by Future Snoops himself.
Sources:
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