The algorithm knows what you want. That’s precisely the problem

In the middle of Paris Fashion Week, a rare concentration of human taste becomes briefly visible. Editors move between shows wearing outfits that reference decades of fashion history. A stylist pairs an archival Japanese design with an emerging Scandinavian label. Every outfit reads like a cultural sentence — references, memories, and deliberate choices layered on top of one another. It feels alive in a way that is becoming harder to find elsewhere. Because outside that environment, the mechanisms through which desire forms are quietly being automated. The way taste develops is changing. And the way luxury brands have historically earned their place in a person's life is under a pressure that has very little to do with price points or product quality. Taste as the new currency Fashion has always communicated more than clothing. From the 18th century onward, fabric, tailoring, and craftsmanship signaled wealth and social position. Today they express identity and cultural literacy. Travel choices, restaurant discoveries, design objects, and aesthetic sensibilities collectively signal how someone interprets the world. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified the mechanism decades ago in Distinction. Taste, he argued, classifies — and it classifies the classifier. Cultural preferences reveal social position. What has changed is that money alone no longer confers it. When access to products becomes widespread, differentiation migrates elsewhere. The luxury resale market illustrates the shift with some precision: the global secondhand apparel market grew from $141 billion in 2021 to an estimated $256 billion in 2025, according to ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report, with a further 12.5% year-on-year rise projected for 2026. Recognizing the cultural significance of a vintage Issey Miyake silhouette or an archival Helmut Lang piece is itself a form of expertise — one that no retail transaction can replicate. Taste, then, has become the scarce resource. When discovery goes algorithmic Into this context, recommendation systems have inserted themselves at scale. Streaming platforms surface content. Social feeds determine which images circulate. Search engines synthesize answers before a user reaches any source. According to the Reuters Institute’s Generative AI and News Report 2025, 54% of consumers across six major markets encountered an artificial intelligence-generated answer to a search query in the past week, while weekly AI use nearly doubled year-on-year to 34% globally. Discovery is no longer primarily a human act. For mass-market categories, this creates efficiencies. For luxury, it creates a structural tension. More than 35% of fashion executives already report using generative AI in functions including image creation, copywriting, and product discovery, according to McKinsey and the Business of Fashion’s State of Fashion 2026 report. AI has shifted from competitive edge to operational baseline. But the direction of travel raises harder questions. According to Deloitte’s 2026 report on agentic commerce, analysts project that 25% of global e-commerce sales will be enabled by AI agents by 2030. Deloitte is explicit, however, about where delegation has limits: consumers are expected to trust AI to reorder household essentials but not to select luxury fashion or gifts, where perceived risk and emotional investment in the purchase decision remain high. An AI agent can optimize discovery. It cannot replicate the act of choosing. Liya Dashkina, co-founder of FashionTech Middle East, describes a dual-speed landscape emerging from this: one system powered by predictive AI and behavioral data, another rooted in community, culture, and storytelling. “Luxury brands will need to optimize their infrastructure for AI discoverability in the background while preserving the human magic of discovery in the foreground,” Dashkina says. Technology organizes access. Culture creates desire. The distance between those two things is precisely what luxury has always sold. The authorship problem Gucci’s campaign ahead of its Spring 2026 Milan Fashion Week show tested that proposition publicly. The house used AI-generated imagery — clearly labeled as such — to promote the show on social media. The reaction from critics and users was swift and hostile. Many argued that for a house built on Italian craftsmanship, choosing automated visuals over human photographers and models undermined the brand's own stated values, with some describing the images as ‘AI slop” — a term for the wave of low-quality AI-generated content flooding digital platforms. Research supports the instinct behind that reaction. A 2025 study published in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics — “Human Bias in the Face of AI” by Zhu, Weissburg, Zhang, and Wang — found that while participants could not reliably distinguish AI-generated from human-generated content in blind evaluations, once authorship was labeled, they favored human-generated work by a preference margin of over 30%. The preference held even when the labels were deliberately swapped. It is not the content itself that carries emotional weight. It is the knowledge that a human made it. The implication is one luxury cannot afford to miss. When AI supports creative work, it expands possibility. When it substitutes for authorship, it erodes the brand equity that luxury houses spend decades building. Where the advantage actually lies The strategic response is not to resist AI but to integrate it without surrendering what it cannot replicate. Three priorities follow from the evidence. The first is making cultural memory machine-legible. As AI assistants become a primary layer of discovery, brands whose archives, aesthetic codes, and creative histories are not structured for algorithmic interpretation will lose visibility. Cultural capital must be digitally legible to remain commercially relevant. The second is amplifying human authorship as a differentiator. McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 observes that as AI handles more execution, judgment becomes more valuable. When machines generate variations at scale, the defining competitive skill is deciding which ideas matter culturally. That judgment belongs to people. Craftsmanship, creative direction, and editorial voice gain importance precisely as synthetic content expands. The third is reclaiming the curator role. In a landscape saturated with algorithmically optimized recommendations, audiences seek guidance from sources that interpret culture rather than simply deliver product. Luxury brands are historically positioned to do exactly this — to build environments where taste is performed, debated, and experienced, not just purchased. Taste is not an algorithmic output. It develops through curiosity, friction, and exposure to unfamiliar references — the accumulated weight of lived experience. Paris Fashion Week is not a nostalgic ritual. It is evidence that non-algorithmic environments, spaces where human judgment operates without optimization, retain a power no model can simulate. An algorithm can predict what might sell. It cannot feel the room. For luxury brands, the competitive advantage in 2026 lies less in the speed of their technology stack and more in the depth of the cultural spaces they build around it. Carlota Rodben is a luxury innovation specialist and author of “Beyond Luxury: The Promise of Emotion.” She previously led innovation at Chanel and now advises luxury brands on strategy and transformation. Daria Kunz is Partnerships Lead and Editor at Beyond Luxury Group, with more than 10 years of experience across Google, Apple, and Interbrand.

The algorithm knows what you want. That’s precisely the problem

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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The algorithm knows what you want. That’s precisely the problem

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag