Gucci Faces Backlash Over 'AI Junk' Visuals Before Milan Fashion Week

Gucci Swapped Real People for AI Ghosts. Milan Fashion Week Will Never Be the Same.

The most talked-about fashion house on earth just sparked its biggest identity crisis. And yes, the internet has receipts.

Picture this. A glamorous older Italian woman sits draped in a classic Gucci silhouette from 1976. The light is golden. The pose is effortless. She looks like she owns three villas and drinks espresso with world leaders. The photo goes up on Gucci's Instagram ahead of Milan Fashion Week. And then someone points out the obvious: she is not real. None of it is. Every pixel of her was generated by artificial intelligence.

The internet, predictably, went off. One user typed what everyone was thinking: "Bleak days when Gucci can't find a real human Milanese grandmother to wear an outfit from 1976." That single comment lit a fire that spread across fashion Twitter, TikTok, and every design school group chat in Europe. Because this is not just about one photo. This is about what luxury fashion is even supposed to mean anymore.

A Brand Built on Craft Just Handed Its Camera to a Robot

Gucci did not try to hide it. The images were clearly labeled "created with AI," which is more transparency than most brands bother with. But transparency does not automatically mean acceptance, especially when your entire brand identity rests on two words: creativity and Italian craftsmanship. Those are not just marketing lines. For a house like Gucci, those words are the whole product.

Dr. Priscilla Chan, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University's Fashion Institute, put it plainly. Some tech-forward moves in fashion have earned brands a flood of positive press. AI risks the opposite. "I think particularly luxury fashion brands need to pay attention to whether the latest technology creates a positive image for their brands," she said. That is a diplomatic way of saying: Gucci may have miscalculated.

"Critics called them AI slop. Fans called them Milano glam. Nobody was neutral. That alone is a marketing win, depending on who you ask."

What Is "AI Slop" and Why Do Fashion People Hate It So Much

The term "AI slop" has become shorthand for the flood of low-effort, AI-generated images cluttering social feeds everywhere. It is the visual equivalent of fast food. Quick to make, everywhere you look, and somehow deeply unsatisfying. When Gucci, a brand with the budget and the talent to hire literally anyone on earth, posts something critics are calling slop, it raises a fair question: what are you actually selling?

Tati Bruening, a photographer with 2.4 million TikTok followers, said she is "generally not a fan" of fashion houses using AI for this kind of work. She drew a clear line: using AI for retouching or mood boards is fine. Replacing the entire human creative process with generated images is where it gets complicated. "There is a difference between enhancing or editing simple things with AI versus image generation," she said. That distinction matters more than people realize.

The Bigger Picture for NFT and Web3 Watchers

This is not Gucci's first dance with digital. The brand previously sold AI-generated visuals as NFTs through Christie's auction house, positioning AI as fine art. It released an AI video of a model on a runway with photographers literally tumbling over each other to shoot her. The irony of that image reads differently now.

When a luxury brand mints AI work as collectible blockchain art, that is a power move. When the same brand posts AI images as promotional content for a runway show, the story changes. One feels like vision. The other feels like cutting corners. The tech is the same. The context is everything.

New Creative Director, New Era, New Controversy

Demna Gvasalia, now at the helm as Gucci's creative director, is about to show his vision on the Milan runway for the first time. The pressure on that show is enormous. Every eye in fashion is on him. So the question worth asking is whether these AI images are a mistake, a statement, or a deliberate strategy to flood the zone with conversation before the clothes even hit the runway.

Bruening floated this theory herself: "I don't feel this campaign was necessarily made to reflect luxury but to create commentary on what luxury actually is." That reading is more interesting than the outrage. Demna built his reputation at Balenciaga by turning fashion inside out, making counterfeit taste into high taste, and forcing audiences to confront their own assumptions. If the AI images are a provocation rather than a shortcut, the joke is on everyone who took the bait.

Other Brands Are Doing This Too. Nobody Talks About Them.

H&M has been quietly experimenting with AI-generated content for advertising. Plenty of high-street and designer labels have tested generative tools for social content. The difference is that nobody cares when a mid-tier brand does it. Gucci is held to a different standard because Gucci charges a different price. When you sell a bag for four thousand dollars on the promise of handmade Italian excellence, your Instagram better not look like it was assembled in thirty seconds by a machine.

That is the real tension here. AI is a tool. Tools are neutral. But brand trust is not neutral. It is built over decades and worn away fast. H&M can run an AI campaign and people shrug. Gucci runs the same campaign and it becomes a referendum on the soul of luxury.

The Bold Take

Gucci did not have an AI problem this week. Gucci had a perception problem. The technology was fine. The strategy, maybe not. But here is the truth nobody wants to say out loud: every single fashion house is testing AI right now. The only difference is that Gucci posted it publicly and put their name on it. That either makes them naive or braver than the rest. The runway show will tell us which one.

What Fashion Designers and Web3 Builders Should Watch Next

If you are a designer, a founder, or a builder sitting at the intersection of fashion and blockchain, pay attention to what Gucci does after the backlash. Not the apology, if there is one. Watch the NFT strategy. Watch whether they mint the AI images as collectibles, turning controversy into scarcity, turning criticism into demand. That is the Web3 playbook and Gucci has used it before.

The audience for digital fashion is growing. The collectors who bought Gucci NFTs through Christie's did not feel cheated. They felt ahead of the curve. The same AI images that feel lazy on Instagram feel like art when they live on a blockchain with provenance attached. The medium shapes the meaning. Right now, Gucci has raw material. What they build with it next is the real story.

Fashion has always been about fantasy. The question now is who gets to build it. Humans who live in the world, breathe the air, age in the light, and carry culture in their bodies? Or algorithms trained on images of all of them? The Milanese grandmother that does not exist haunts this conversation for a reason. She represents something AI cannot generate: time, memory, and the weight of a life actually lived. Gucci knows how to sell that feeling. The test now is whether they still believe they need a real person in the room to do it.