Zara turns to AI to generate fashion imagery using real-life models

LONDON: Zara has become the latest fast-fashion retailer to use AI to help create new images of real models in different outfits, speeding up the production process as part of an industry shift that could have a major impact on fashion photography.

Zara’s AI experimentation follows Swedish rival H&M, which earlier this year said it had created AI clones of models to use in marketing. European online fashion retailer Zalando is also using AI to create imagery faster.

“We are using artificial intelligence only to complement our existing processes,” a spokesperson for Zara owner Inditex said in a statement. “We work collaboratively with our valued models – agreeing any aspect on a mutual basis – and compensate in line with industry best practice.”

Zara’s move was first reported by London business-focused newspaper CityAM, which cited an unnamed model saying Zara asked for approval to edit images of them with AI to show different items, and that they were paid the same amount as if they had travelled for another photo shoot.

H&M and Zalando, like Inditex, have said AI would complement their creative teams’ processes and help them be more efficient rather than replacing them, downplaying the risk to photographers and production teams who work on fashion shoots.

Inditex chair Marta Ortega, daughter of the founder Amancio Ortega, has spoken in interviews about her passion for fashion photography.

Since 2021 her MOP (Marta Ortega Perez) Foundation gallery in A Coruna, the town in northern Spain where Zara was founded, has hosted exhibitions showcasing the work of major photographers.

It is currently showing Annie Leibovitz’s fashion photography, and previous exhibitions have spotlighted photography greats Steven Meisel - with whom Zara has worked extensively - and Helmut Newton.

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Ortega has tried to move Zara upmarket, cutting store numbers to focus on fewer, bigger flagships with a more spacious, sophisticated feel.

Isabelle Doran, CEO of the Association of Photographers in London, said the use of AI would reduce the number of times photographers, models and production teams are commissioned, impacting a whole ecosystem of established professionals as well as early-career fashion photographers trying to get a foothold in the industry.