Fashion brands from Louis Vuitton to Levi’s are using artificial intelligence (AI) -generated fashion models on their websites and in their ad campaigns. These synthetic models are created from data scraped from the internet and, in some cases, from the biometric and visual data of individual human models. The technology is new but, as Minh-Ha T. Pham’s talk will explain, the conditions that make possible the use and expansion of AI-generated models are as old as the fashion supply chain itself. AI-generated models don’t mark a transformative shift in the fashion industry; they’re another example of global fashion’s long history of extractivism. As such, the answers for how to fight the automation of modeling work also lie in the long history of fashion workers’ struggles.

Minh-Ha T. Pham’s research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, class, and the fashion supply chain under global and informational capitalism. She’s the author of two books: Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging (Duke, 2015) and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property (Duke, 2022).