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You could argue that human involvement in the future of technology matters now more than ever. As generative AI takes hold and long-held promises about the potential of automation come to fruition, the people behind the scenes at startups and fashion brands experimenting with new tools are the ones shaping how we’ll interact with technology from here on out. It’s no small task. These innovators are rethinking our relationships with brands and technology, challenging perspectives and taking spaces like gaming and the metaverse to new places. From founders to big tech agitators and brand leads, these are the people determining the future of fashion tech.
Co-founder | Kiki World
An old adage in product development and marketing is “go where the customer is”. Kiki World, the brainchild of co-founder Jana Bobosikova, takes that concept much further by directly asking customers to vote on product decisions. In return, customers can earn points that go towards free products, and they can receive blockchain-based tokens that offer partial ownership of the company.
Kiki is a Web3-native beauty brand whose products play to a techie, youthful mindset without hammering home the NFT refrain. Its NFC-chipped press-on nails made waves at New York Fashion Week in February, appearing on the Dauphinette runway and igniting the imagination of creators eager for a way to share their Instagram accounts while waiting in line. Other popular products include a ‘Pretty Nail Graffiti’ (or PNG) peel-off nail polish pen and a temporary hair colour called ‘One Night Strand’, while voting for the ‘Skin Development Kit’ (or SDK) sticks remained in progress. In the first year since its 2023 founding, Kiki World attracted more than 100,000 “reward actions” (such as voting, minting and using products) in community-created experiences and products. The voting-first approach, which also reduces the number of unsold products, has attracted the attention of investors as well. This April, it announced $7 million in funding from industry heavyweights A16Z and The Estée Lauder Companies’s New Incubation Ventures, among others.
Co-founder and CEO | Archive Resale
With luxury resale on the rise, brands are left in a predicament: should they play along or watch as third-party resellers shift their existing products? Emily Gittins, CEO of Archive Resale, wants to help brands own independent resale channels. Brand partners include Ulla Johnson, Oscar de la Renta and Sandro. Using her tech background, Gittins powers resale software for brands in a bid to work towards a circular economy.
Key to Archive’s strategy is that it enables retailers to be flexible. At Ulla Johnson, customers can choose to shop from the designer’s own closet. At Pangaia, the programme also integrates digital ID company Eon so that all products sold going forth will be tagged with digital IDs that enable resale at the click of a button. Most recently, in February, circular fashion hub Advanced Clothing Solutions came on board to offer partner brands access to their cleaning and repair solutions at the UK’s ACS hub. At the helm, Gittins is developing new solutions alongside Archive’s base offering to onboard more brands to owned resale — a channel she expects every brand to have in the near future.
Founder and CEO | 100 Thieves
Former pro-gamer Matthew Haag launched gaming organisation 100 Thieves in 2017, aiming to create cool gaming merch that was less obvious, more unique and better quality than existing product on the market. It’s become the largest fashion brand in gaming, and has collaborated with Adidas and Gucci, as well as operating esports teams and hosting major gaming events for its community. Under Haag’s leadership, 100 Thieves has signed prominent influencers like TikToker Vinnie Hacker and YouTube gaming star Rachell ‘Valkyrae’ Hofstetter, who promote the business on their socials. 100 Thieves secured $60 million in series C funding in 2021, taking its total funding to date to $460 million. Key investors include Drake and Cleveland Cavaliers owner (and StockX founding investor) Dan Gilbert.
Co-founders | The Gang
Entrepreneur Marcus Holmström and game designer Gustav Linde are co-founders of gaming studio The Gang, which launched in Stockholm in 2019 and is the engine behind a series of popular games and fashion brand experiences on Roblox. The Gang was early to recognise the potential of Roblox as a platform for brand activation and has helped various fashion and lifestyle labels build Roblox worlds to reach new, young consumers. Its projects include the Gucci x Vans co-branded world, Givenchy Beauty’s winter world and footballer Jack Grealish’s appearance in Roblox’s Gucci Town. The Gang, which now operates across Lisbon, Stockholm and Kuala Lumpur, creates mini games and interactivity tailored to each brand and has even implemented personalisation of virtual products within Roblox worlds, which brands such as Vans can use to learn about customer likes. It was profitable in its first year of operation (2020), and is now an eight-figure business.
Co-founders | Blng
Generative AI is seen as a broad technology that can hypothetically expand access to design and creativity and shorten the time it takes for creatives to translate ideas into tangible products. Valerie Leblond and Dumene Comploi, co-founders and the CEO and CTO of Blng, are bringing that technology to the fine jewellery industry in a practical, specific way, having created a tool that speeds up and simplifies the technical and slow process of 3D modelling and rendering in jewellery design.
Blng can convert rough sketches, paintings or text prompts into photorealistic 3D renders of jewellery that can be tweaked with text prompts in seconds. It then converts that render into an on-model image — especially useful for custom jewellery. The founders’ backgrounds span design and engineering (Comploi’s work has more than 10 patents), immersive technologies, robotics and even theatre troupe Cirque du Soleil; they have raised at least $2 million, and clients include a celebrity brand, a major retailer and a large diamond house. This spring, it was recognised by LVMH with a Special Innovation Prize for smart use of data, AI and generative AI, leading to luxury brand pilots in the works. That’s a blistering pace for a tech startup founded in 2023, illustrating the immediate practical potential of a complex technology.
Founder and futurist | M7 Innovations
Many in the luxury industry are curious about phygital NFT products, AI wearables and NFC-chipped merch. Few have actually kicked the tyres. Matt Maher, futurist founder of M7 Innovations, an independent research and development firm that demystifies and stress tests innovation for curious luxury executives, is one of those few.
The Dior B33 connected sneaker? The soundtrack-enabled Balenciaga hoodie? The AR-enhanced Rimowa and Rtfkt suitcase? The Apple Vision Pro versus Meta’s smart glasses? Even the Humane AI pin — Maher has tested those products and more, filming the results and sharing them with clients through non-nonsense video recaps, newsletters and presentations. He is often tapped to take things a step further, helping brands dream up and prototype uses for new technologies.
While much of his work is confidential, he’s on the international advisory board of Chanel, where he has advised on innovation since 2018 across multiple divisions, and on the board for AR and VR company the Glimpse Group. With Snapchat, M7 helped develop projects using its new In-Lens Digital Goods system, which allows in-app upgrades for AR lenses. Most recently, M7 was tapped by MIT’s research-focused Media Lab to provide insights into the challenges facing the world’s top brands and to help develop solutions.
VP of product, augmented reality and AI | Meta
The brightest minds in tech have tried to convince consumers to wear smart glasses for more than a decade, but nothing has taken off. That changed when Meta’s Li-Chen Miller announced a new generation of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses on the Meta Connect stage in September.
Wearing a cat T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, Miller introduced the complex tech with approachable energy, tapping into the zeitgeist by emphasising how people can wear the glasses so that they no longer have to “choose between capturing the moment and experiencing it” — a concept that immediately ignited interest from fashion editors and creators.
Miller, as VP of product, augmented reality and artificial intelligence at Meta, led the launch of what has become Meta’s surprising smart glasses success story and the first hardware from the company to have Meta AI built in, leading to more styles and interest from additional brands. Part tech device, part fashion statement (made in partnership with luxury eyewear makers EssilorLuxottica), demand has outstripped supply and fashion brands are now giving the glasses a closer look. Miller is also an advocate for women leaders within the innovation division of Meta’s Reality Labs, having created a group of 12 senior women leaders who are supporting 250 women at Meta across disciplines, becoming one of the most popular such programmes introduced at the social metaverse company.
Founder and CEO | Mmerch
You’ve heard of haute couture, but how about neo-couture? It’s a category coined by Colby Mugrabi, the fashion-tech entrepreneur who founded Mmerch in 2022. The new-age ‘fashion house’ combines digital design, blockchain and craftsmanship to introduce more people to the power and potential of tech-enabled couture.
Each item in Mmerch’s collections is one-of-one and backed by NFT, taking the concept of exclusive ownership to new levels. In her role, Mugrabi acts as a tech translator for fashion traditionalists, showing how AI and Web3 technology can change everything from product design and ideation to manufacturing, retail and customer experience without sacrificing the human element that makes fashion so personal to the masses. The concept is backed by Christie’s Ventures and Karlie Kloss, having raised $6.4 million earlier this year. With a background in both fashion and technology, Mugrabi sits in a unique position to chart the path forward for the two to coexist without alienating what came before.
Digital director | Balenciaga
As a deluge of brands experiment with digital identities, mixed reality and gaming, it can be hard to stand out. And yet Balenciaga has carved its own path, trialling first-of-their-kind projects that push the uses and expectations of new technologies. This is thanks, in part, to the work of Gary Pinagot, who, as the digital director of Balenciaga, has led global digital and innovation efforts at the house since May 2022.
In November 2023, he developed a project to give Balenciaga pieces their own exclusive soundtrack, meaning that only those wearing the garment could access the songs and hear the music. This project created a compelling reason for consumers to desire and interact with digital product identities — no small feat — and paved the way for a future in which digital product passports add value and inspire loyalty. Pinagot also worked to develop an app for the Apple Vision Pro that was the first to stream fashion shows, timed to the global release of the mixed reality device, and led a project that brought digital Balenciaga to video game Need for Speed, spanning custom branded car designs and corresponding physical merchandise.
Co-founder | Relove and Caimera
Kirti Poonia’s journey as an entrepreneur began in 2015 with Okhai, a social enterprise that empowered women in rural areas of Gujarat, India, to enter the marketplace with artisanal products. Today, Okhai collaborates with 30,000 women from various craft clusters, and Poonia sits on its board. She followed this success by partnering with her husband, Prateek Gupte, to launch Relove, a resale technology that allows brands to establish peer-to-peer resale marketplaces on their websites. When it launched in November 2021, resale was still a relatively nascent concept in India, with the cultural norm being passing down pre-owned goods within families rather than selling them. Relove now powers resale for over 60 fashion brands.
While building Relove, the pair identified a gap in the market for high-quality fashion photography, which led to the birth of Caimera, a photoshoot tool that creates hyper-real images. Within the first six months of operation, Caimera attracted 45 international clients, including industry giants like Steve Madden, H&M and UAE-based Landmark Group. By using AI to create lifestyle photography in any location or with any body type, Poonia aims to lower the environmental footprint of fashion marketing. She is also investing in education by teaching and employing a team of prompt engineers, creating job opportunities and a new job role in fashion: ‘AI fashion prompter’.
SVP of strategy | Adore Me
Ranjan Roy’s role as SVP of strategy at intimates brand Adore Me doesn’t require a particularly tech-savvy lens. However, it hasn’t stopped him from being an early adopter of practical, useful technologies behind the scenes, pulling in part from his experience at a news personalisation startup and from working at the Financial Times.
Roy joined in 2019, and has led projects spanning sustainability, content and marketing; early on, his work helped attract the attention of Victoria’s Secret, which acquired the company in 2023. Roy has been a particularly savvy adopter of machine learning and generative AI to save time and money, including upskilling employees to enable them to quickly iterate on SEO-informed web copy and more. The brand has created its own large language models for text-based tasks including copywriting, image creation and customer service, among others. Most recently, it brought generative AI into the hands of customers with a tool that allows people to create designs for printing on bras and panties using their own text-based prompts. While this is fun and engaging for customers — they create five designs on average, and many are using generative art for the first time through the Adore Me platform — it also cuts down on waste and informs research on customer desires.
Chief business officer | Brandible
Caitlin Shell thinks fashion should be fun. So fun, in fact, she’s spent her career bridging the worlds of fashion and gaming, one of the industry’s most promising playgrounds for new audiences.
Shell cut her teeth at Covet Fashion, the OG mobile fashion game, where she helped onboard hundreds of brands, enabling gamers to dress their avatars in swimwear and evening gowns from For Love & Lemons and Badgley Mischka. Then, she spent time at metaverse gaming platform Drest.
Today, Shell is the chief business officer of Brandible Games, which earlier this year launched FashionVerse in collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger’s Hilfiger Ventures. The game leans into AI, designing 3D garments that are tailored to a wide range of sizes, shapes, heights, ethnicities and physical abilities. Players compete to style the best outfits and compile mood boards, with pieces available to collect along the way. “I really believe that video games will be another retail platform in the future,” Tommy Hilfiger told Vogue Business at launch. Shell is a key part of that future.
Artist
This February, a collection of 500 digital dresses sold for an approximate total of $1.2 million in 12 seconds. That’s the power of artist Claire Silver, whose work brings digital fashion, NFTs and generative artificial intelligence to the mainstream.
The collection aimed to showcase the quality that text-to-image AI can enable, ranging from metallic embroidery to late Victorian and Edwardian fashion — a nod to the new ‘Industrial Revolution’ brought by AI. Silver believes that taste — not manual skills — will be the new hallmarks of artists, with their prompts being the artist’s fingerprint. Her work is now in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has been featured at Sotheby’s London and Christie’s New York, among others.
This winter, Silver will debut an experience that aims to further bring AI-generated art and fashion into the mainstream, with an immersive travelling installation that will visit 10 global cities with 3D printed sculptures, conceptual robotics, haptic virtual reality, holograms and more, enabling visitors to co-create works that they can acquire as NFTs. At a time when consumers and creatives are quite distrusting of both AI-created works and NFTs, Silver’s work offers a different, more joyful perspective.
Global digital innovation director | Louis Vuitton
As the most valuable luxury brand in the world, Louis Vuitton’s products and projects are closely followed, often indicating the direction of travel to the wider industry. So when it comes to NFTs, phygital goods and artificial intelligence, Louis Vuitton’s strategy leaves a mark. That’s the responsibility of Agnès Vissoud, who founded Louis Vuitton’s digital innovation department in 2017 and serves as its global director.
Vissoud has been influential in shaping the future of the industry, having helped develop the Aura Blockchain Consortium (of which Louis Vuitton parent company, LVMH, is a founding member), which is establishing a blockchain-based standard for digital product passports for the entire luxury industry. She also led the development of Louis Vuitton Via, the brand’s major NFT project that bucked Web3 trends in favour of a long-term loyalty play. Notably, the project is still ongoing during a crypto downturn, having successfully token-gated runway products through high-value NFTs. Going forward, Vissoud’s work will continue influencing the industry through new uses of AI and immersive technologies.
EVP of omnichannel | Hugo Boss
Hugo Boss has been undergoing a major transition, hoping to bring attention to the brand and generate a new, younger audience where there wasn’t one — a tall order for the brand, which is now split into two after going through a refresh.
The work of Jan Philipp Wintjes has been a big part of that mission since he joined from PVH Europe in 2021. Now the EVP of omnichannel, Wintjes leads strategy for all Web3, metaverse and tech efforts, which have helped Hugo Boss gain relevance and revenue from the next generation. Wintjes’s strategy is not timid. Most notably, the company recently introduced a membership programme called Hugo Boss XP, that combines traditional loyalty features like levels and points with innovative blockchain elements and Web3 features. It focuses on the Hugo Boss customer app — used across both brands — and tokens can be used to unlock exclusive products, experiences and offers from both Boss and Hugo; in the future, customers may be able to trade tokens.
Wintjes’s strategy links the digital and physical in other ways, too, including a ‘planet’ of interconnected experiences in Roblox and a gamified, virtual, shoppable version of its luxury villa in Bali.
Founder | RM Group
In May 2021, Alibaba debuted one of the first metahumans in China, called Ayayi. With her pearlescent hair and perfect Cupid’s bow, Ayayi has since worked with luxury houses, including Louis Vuitton, Prada and Tiffany, not to mention beauty companies like Guerlain and Shiseido. The virtual influencer even debuted a phygital collection in December 2024 that included hoodies and wing-like avatars in augmented reality shoots.
Nicky Yu Xiao is the brains behind the creation of Ayayi and the founding partner of tech company RM Group, established in September 2020. Xiao, whose background is in film and TV production, is also behind the hugely successful Robbi, an IP that has collaborated with world-renowned brands, including Porsche and Descente and has fronted a global campaign for fragrance house Creed. Tapping China’s wave of large language models and artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC), RM Group has since moved into an AI-first strategy and launched an AIGC marketing assistant with the aim of reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
SVP of global visual experience | Coach
Coach wants to introduce Gen Z consumers to its new idea of “expressive luxury”, centring around self-expression and individuality in place of accessibility. To do that, it’s experimenting with formats and forums that break new ground while still aligning with the broader look and feel of the American heritage brand.
A lot of that comes down to the work of Giovanni Zaccariello, Coach’s SVP of global visual experience. Zaccariello has been at Coach for more than 13 years, and his role has since expanded to include both digital and physical experiences, spanning metaverse and gaming appearances, digital products and mixed reality devices, alongside fashion shows and immersive store merchandising. Zaccariello’s work is unique in that it blends the brand’s wider marketing messages into new formats with bold curiosity. Last spring, an augmented reality mirror in a SoHo shop window managed to stop busy New Yorkers in their tracks so that they could try on digital Tabby bags while proving to Coach that there was untapped interest in these types of experiences — it brought 50 per cent more people into the store.
More recently, Zaccariello’s team developed a simultaneous metaverse roll-out that spanned two worlds in Roblox and one in Zepeto, illustrating a notable appetite for testing and learning in a very public setting. The work is paying off: millennials and Gen Zs make up half of the brand’s total new customers each quarter.
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