Vogue World closed its Milan edition this week with a troupe of robots — perhaps a preview of what’s coming when the event descends on San Francisco next year. Vogue World is the magazine’s annual traveling spectacle, now in its fifth year: part runway show, part celebrity showcase, part variety hour, part ad-sales opportunity, staged in a different city each time. It has run through New York, London, Paris, and Hollywood.
This year’s Milan edition was marketed as a tribute to Italian craftsmanship and “the human touch” in an age of technology, which makes what happened next a little strange. During the act titled The Age of Intelligence, humanoid robots made by the Chinese firm Unitree walked into the Galleria to Gigi D’Agostino’s “L’Amour Toujours.” They waved their arms in the air, imploring onlookers to clap. They were not wearing clothes.
The pained expression of Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Valentino, quickly went viral. I haven’t seen a single thing about the actual fashion that was presented at Vogue World Milan. Instead, everyone is talking about the robots. (These same robots have been making headlines worldwide for their dance moves, and for falling and breaking.) Similar robots turned up on the runway at London Fashion Week, which is happening now.
Vogue turned heads earlier this year when it announced that the next edition will be in San Francisco, arguably one of the least stylish cities in the United States. The timing isn’t coincidental. Anna Wintour has aligned herself ever more closely with the tech barons of our time, and Vogue World Milan was itself sponsored in part by Meta Glasses, with additional support from OpenAI.
It was one of those moments that reveals how thoroughly tech exists in a bubble, and that not everyone is happy with the rapid adoption of new technology, or by Vogue cozying up to the symbols of the insanely rich — and only getting richer — tech titans during a cost-of-living crisis. That’s before you get to AI, mass surveillance, the displacement of labor, and the energy crisis, all of them overseen by the same titans. For some, a robot on a runway is further proof of what is going wrong in the world right now.
People are literally losing jobs and livelihoods because of these things. They need to stop encouraging it. Headphones?” One fashion reporter friend simply said “No,” when I asked for thoughts on the robots and Vogue World San Francisco.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
