This article is part of the Future of AI, a collection of articles that investigates how artificial intelligence will impact the fashion and beauty industries in the years to come.
Earlier this year, tech moguls and CEOs began rhapsodizing about the importance of taste.
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham predicted in February: “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.” The same month, OpenAI president Greg Brockman espoused that “taste is a new core skill”.
In fashion (and a plethora of other industries, creative or otherwise) the notion that taste has not always been imperative is laughable. The concept of taste, though, has been amplified and contorted in the age of generative AI, the much-interrogated and debated concept of aesthetic judgement fast emerging as a 2026 buzzword. “Every company right now wants to talk about taste. Every thought leader in tech wants to write a Substack about taste,” says Andy McCune, founder of Cosmos, a visual inspiration platform.
It’s a thought-leadership exercise in showing that AI executives are not detached from the primarily human asset of good taste. Yet, if taste and personal style are innately human, cultivated through engagements with various cultural outputs — books, film, people on the street — could AI ever understand a user’s personal style, or cultivate its own sense of taste? It’s a pressing question for the fashion industry, where these very instincts are at play at every level, from clothing design to outfit and product recommendations (many of which are already coming from AI platforms and tools).
Some working in tech are entirely confident that it can be done. “I hate to break this to everyone, but you probably don’t have better taste than the AI,” one head of product wrote on X. “There’s a good chance AI will have better ideas than us within a few years,” an AI CEO quipped.
Those not siloed to the world of tech, however, are less convinced. “Taste and personal style is something you develop with time and with real-life experience,” says trend forecaster Mandy Lee. “Having no touchpoints to the real world is the antithesis of building personal taste. So whatever they’re talking about is not the same thing as taste and style.”
Shoppers themselves are unconvinced, too. At present, only 3% of shoppers surveyed by Vogue Business say they use AI chatbots to find fashion and style inspiration — versus 57% for magazines (both print and digital), followed by street style (47%), fashion blogs, Substack or Pinterest (36%), and influencers (35%).
Personal style has long been used to signal certain types of aspiration, to cultivate an individual personality that dictates how one fits into society, says Richard Thompson Ford, professor at Stanford Law School and author of Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History. People do so by borrowing and combining references from all different aspects of life, from other communities to historical periods or social classes, using familiar images as reference points, whether it’s art and film or celebrities and influencers. Good taste isn’t merely copying, Thompson Ford says, but rather, “quoting small parts of a familiar ensemble and putting them together with other things in order to express something that, at least to them, is unique and individual”.
Peoples’ increasing inclination to turn to AI for discovery could well rework the way in which they develop their own sense of style. Fashion-tech startups are bullish on AI tech’s ability to cut out the mundane and remove the friction. AI shopping platform Daydream wants to do just this. Its usership isn’t “fashion with a capital F”, says Lisa Yamner, co-founder and chief brands officer. “The people who are finding us are quite needs-based; it’s more fashion enthusiast than ‘show me Loewe’s recent runway’ kind of stuff.”
