This year, Swedish fashion brand H&M shocked the world when it announced that it planned to create digital clones of its models.
H&M told CNN that the models would own the rights to their “digital clone” and “potentially work for any brand and get paid on each occasion just like on any campaign production.”
This raised questions about the rise of artificial intelligence and if models would be needed in the future if fake “AI models” can be used going forward.
Now, it appears that this has made its way into fashion publishing.
A post on X that has gone viral shows that Vogue’s August issue includes photoshoots with “AI models” instead of human models. Actress Anne Hathaway graces the cover. "AI" women grace the pages on the inside.
Vogue’s August issue has begun to use “AI models” instead of human models for some of their photoshoots.
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) July 24, 2025
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Women’s magazines have always been under fire for setting unrealistic expectations for girls. This takes it a step further.
Just months ago, Vogue Business published an article titled, “Are digital models about to become the industry standard?”
The piece examined how H&M used “AI models” in marketing campaigns. Vogue Business referred to this as “an unstoppable shift” (via Vogue Business):
AI can already produce hyperrealistic models, often trained on imagery of real fashion models — frequently without consent. This is one of the core ethical flashpoints: AI tools often scrape public imagery without input or consent, detaching models from their own likeness and labour.
“We can easily create digital models of any type, any ethnicity, any body type — anything you want,” says Cyril Foiret, founder of Maison Meta, a generative AI agency that has worked with the likes of H&M, Mango and Revolve.
“In many ways, the biggest problem I have with what’s happening and the kind of pathway to augmentation and automation is that fashion models’ images were already used to train these AI models without their consent,” says model and futurist Sinead Bovell, who predicted in 2020 that AI would eventually replace models’ jobs. “That has already taken away a lot of power from fashion models. This technology is built on an entire chain of exploitation of modelling and of the industry.”
