What Guess’s AI model in Vogue means for beauty standards

There is a new super model in the city. Striking, stylish … and not real.

In the printed edition of Vogue of August, it offers a guess ad, a striped maxi dress and a flawless blonde model showing a flower game from the brand’s summer collection.

It reveals that in small printing in a corner, it is created using the advertising AI.

While Vogue said that the AI model was not an editorial decision, a person produced by AI for the first time in the magazine.

Advertising has been met with debates, and the real models and consumers fighting for more diversity – especially young people – reveal questions about what it means struggling with unrealistic beauty standards.

Seraphinne Vallora is behind Guess’s controversial advertisement.

Founders Valentina Gonzalez and Andreea Petrescu were asked to create an AI model as a part of the brand’s summer campaign by the BBC’s founding partner Paul Marciano.

“We created 10 draft models for him and chose a brunette woman and a blonde and developed even more.”

AI explains that image production is simple and is actually a complex process, saying that there is a misunderstanding.

The company has five employees that make up AI models and can take up to a month for the product completed from the idea organization. The couple says they charge anywhere up to a low -six figures for a customer like Guess.

However, Felicity Hayward, a plus -sized model in the industry for more than a decade, says that the AI models are “lazy and cheap” in fashion campaigns.

“Either guess this is to create a point of speech and make a free promotion, or they want to reduce costs and think about the results of it.”

He describes Vogue’s decision to include the advertisement as “very courageous and quite frightening” and is worried, and therefore weaken the work towards more diversity in the sector.

The fashion world made a real progress to be more inclusive in the 2010s-for the years, Valentina saw that Sampaio was the first open trance model in which Victoria was walking for the secret of Victoria, Halima Aden was the first model wearing Hijab in global campaigns, and brands such as Savage X Fenty are plus-sized models on the track.

But in recent years, Hayward believes that the industry has fallen back because “These people are no longer reserved”.

And the use of AI models is “another kick in the teeth and a kick that will affect a plus -sized models disproportionately”.

Gonzalez and Petrescu are determined that they do not strengthen narrow beauty standards.

“We do not create inaccessible appearance – AI for Guess looks quite realistic,” Petrescu says. “Ultimately, all ads are created to look perfect and often have super models, so what we do is no different.”

The couple acknowledges that AI images of their companies on Instagram page lack diversity and support unrealistic beauty standards. They say they are trying to be more inclusive, but users who do not interact too much with these posts.

“We have published artificial intelligence images of women with different skin tones, but people do not respond to them – we do not receive any traction or appreciation.”

“At the end of the day, we use pictures that will create a job and a speech on Instagram and bring customers to us.”

The company does not try to create plus -sized women by claiming that “technology is not developed enough for this”.

An advertising campaign by Dove in 2024 was designed to emphasize prejudices in AI. In the ad, an image generator is asked to create the most beautiful woman in the world and produces almost unconcerned women with blonde hair and blue eyes. The created images look like the Guess AI model.

Hayward is concerned that these inaccessible images may have an impact on the mental health of people and may adversely affect body images.

The concern about unrealistic beauty standards and damaging effects they may have is nothing new. However, contrary to the traditional air brush that starts with a real person, these AI models are created digitally to look away from human defects, inconsistencies or uniqueness.

Some high profile figures such as Ashley Graham, Jameela Jamil and Bella Thorne spoke against the image arrangement and refused to take pictures of their paintings, AI completely use such conversations.

Vogue’s decision to add an ad created by AI created an excitement with a user with a user X letter: “Wow! If beauty expectations are not realistic enough, AI comes to make them impossible. Even models cannot compete.”

Vanessa Longley, CEO of Eating Dissifting Charity Beat, says BBC is “worrying”.

“If people are exposed to images of unrealistic bodies, they can affect their thoughts about their bodies and increase the risk of developing weak body image eating disorder, or he says.

In addition to the problem, it is a lack of transparency – it is not a legal requirement to label content created by AI in the UK.

While the GUESS ad is produced by AI, the waiver is small and thin. Readers can ignore it, and at a glance, the image looks completely realistic.

A former model and now technology entrepreneur Sinead Boyl wrote an article about the risks of AI’s change for Vogue five years ago.

It tells the BBC that not to explicitly label AI content is “extraordinary problematic” because it may have a harmful effect on the mental health of people.

“Beauty standards are already affected by AI. There are young girls who receive plastic surgery to look like a face in a filter – and now we see people who are completely artificial,” he says.

In addition to the effect of AI models on a consumer, what will be the effect of this technology on employees in the fashion industry?

Sara Ziff is a former model and founder of Model Alliance, an organization aiming to advance workers’ rights in the fashion industry.

He says the Guess’s AI campaign is “less that it should reduce innovation and helplessness and costs”.

In a broader way, AI, in the old model fashion industry, thinks that it is not naturally exploitative, but it can usually come at the expense of people who have implemented it because there is only more personnel than the model and the photographer in a photo shoot.

“AI may positively affect the industry, but for workers, there must be meaningful guards,” he explains.

Seraphinne Vallora rejects the idea that it has dismissed people and says that the pioneering technology is “additional and does not intend to replace models”.

“We offer companies another option for how they market a product,” Petrescu said.

The couple added that they create business with their companies and that some of the process of creating AI models requires a real model and photographer renting to see how the product looks to a person in real life.

However, the website lists one of the benefits of working with them, because “expensive installations, mua artists, venue rental, stage environment, photographers, travel expenses, eliminating the need for recruitment models”.

Vogue entered under fire to include the advertisement in the printed edition, and a person in X said that Moda magazine “lost reliability”.

Butel says that the magazine is “seen as the high court of the fashion industry”, so allow AI advertisement to work “.

BBC approached Vogue and predicted for a comment. Vogue said it was an advertisement, that he refused to respond more, not an editorial decision.

So, what does the future of the modeling industry look like?

Gonzalez and Petrescu believe that as the technologies develop, they will make more demand by brands who want to do things differently.

Boldell thinks that there will be more models produced by AI in the future, but “we do not go to a future where each model is created by AI”.

In the industry, he sees positively in the development of artificial intelligence – everyone can “start to see ourselves as fashion models”, because we can create a personal AI avatar to see how clothes look and look appropriate.

However, “he adds that we can reach the stage of not being interested in AI models because we know that it is not very accessible and we know that it is not real.”