Etro Spring 2024 Ad Campaign

Review of Etro Spring 2024 Ad Campaign by Digital Artist Silvia Badalotti

Etro is the latest brand to explore the dream-like possibilities of AI-generated imagery in a fashion campaign. The Italian house’s Spring 2024 campaign was created in partnership with digital artist and “prompt designer” Silvia Badalotti.

Badalotti’s AI images take their cue from the kaleidoscopic character of Etro’s signature prints as well as movements in art history like classical revivalism in architecture and Dutch Golden Age still-life painting. Uncanny pseudo-humans wear Marco de Vincenzo’s intricately colorful looks among dreamy landscapes that blur the boundaries between reality, art history, and cyberspace.

But of course, like all AI-generated imagery, the portraits can’t help but feeling a bit soulless and flat. Aside from the distorted background details that don’t make visual sense (and not in an intentional way), the images have that sense of coldness and disproportionality that attests to their algorithmic origins. While we can’t fault a brand for wanting to engage with new avenues of creativity and communication, it feels like a frustratingly out-of-touch move for a luxury house known for material richness to fully commit to a medium that is inherently immaterial and arguably insipid.

Fashion, furthermore, is a collaborative and human endeavor, and AI imagery feels out of touch with both of these essential aspects. As a basis for inspiration, it is certainly a powerful and worthwhile tool, but it feels a bit lazy to position it as your final product. Though it probably wasn’t a conscious driving force, it can be hard not to read an AI campaign as a way to not pay stylists, photographers, makeup artists, models, and all the other workers who are responsible for the creation of a fashion image.

AI will continue to develop, and there is a wider conversation to be had and to keep returning to as to what this technology’s role ought to be within fashion. While we celebrate Etro for undertaking the experiment, we also encourage them and all fashion brands to think about whether it is the best way to communicate the character of beautiful clothes and the essential aspects of brand identity in campaigns to be proud of.