As AI Floods the Feed, Fashion Marketers Tap Artists

Using AI in marketing has proven to be a surefire way to get people talking, but an increasing number of fashion brands are taking the opposite approach.

Labels including Loewe, Hermès, Chanel and more have enlisted visual artists, including painters, illustrators, sculptors and ceramicists this year to bring their brand worlds to life, whether it’s through a watercolour-painted campaign, a hand-drawn website takeover or an haute couture runway show announcement video overlaid with animated illustrations.

Art and fashion, particularly luxury, have a long shared history, from Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí’s lobster dress to Louis Vuitton’s multi-pronged partnership with the late Yayoi Kusama. But this latest resurgence of artist team-ups is driven by brands working with emerging talents, like illustrators Karlotta Freier and Sarah Martinon, who have been tapped by the likes of Dior, Chanel and Hermès.

Brands are increasingly weighing taste and perspective more heavily than follower count or broad appeal, said Aleksandra Mikhaylova, marketing manager at design agency Vaan Group. Working with emerging artists, she added, allows them access to a fresh point of view and to express their identity in a new medium, while underscoring their own heritage in craft — particularly as the industry seeks to rebound from a years-long sales slump that was propelled in part by a feeling of overcommercialisation.

Plus, while AI-generated campaigns are nearly sure to garner backlash, working with artists is almost guaranteed to draw praise.

“Keeping their eyes extremely open to creativity and emerging creative talent allows [brands] to … bring in new forms of expression and points of view,” said Martinon. “It creates quite a virtuous image.”

More than that, though, it’s a reflection of consumers’ growing desire to log off. Several brands are leaning on nostalgia in marketing as analogue activities, from reading books to crafts like painting, enter the cultural foreground. Artist-led marketing feeds the demand for imperfect, human-created visuals as feeds are flooded with technically flawless “AI slop.”

“At a time when very little in our world feels organic and human, artists are seen as [authentic],” said Morgane Richer La Flèche, a New York-based artist who has collaborated with labels including Susan Alexandra, Eliza Faulkner and Salter House.

But brands need to ensure they’re not just jumping on the bandwagon. Suddenly working with an illustrator shortly after running an AI-generated campaign can come across as inauthentic. Brands need to ensure their partnerships not only speak to their deeper brand ethos, like Hermès’s long-standing commitment to craft, but also nurture deep, rather than one-off, relationships with artists who understand their brand world.

“It’s not just ‘Oh, in the last 12 months, Hermès [has done] a bunch of illustrator stuff, so now lots of luxury brands are trying to do that,’” said Owen Mears, the co-founder and chief executive of fragrance brand Ffern, which has been building a network of artists since shortly after its 2018 launch. “It’s really trying to have that deep connection to artists throughout every step of the process.”

Building Brand Worlds by Hand

A handicraft resurgence following a period of technological innovation is a historical pattern with plenty of precedent.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for instance, artists pushed back against the industrial revolution with the arts and crafts movement, hand-crafting intricate furniture, wallpaper and more, said Richer La Flèche.

“Industrialisation happened and there was this disenchantment with the world, and everyone was rushing to find ways to make daily life magical again,” she said. As part of her partnership with Eliza Faulkner, she painted fairytale-inspired murals for the brand’s Montreal flagship — a similar form of escapism through art.

There’s a similar phenomenon happening today. Beyond the explosion of AI, after years of polished imagery as the norm on social media, there is renewed interest in showcasing imperfect, relatable humanity through handmade art. That’s particularly true for luxury brands, which can use this sort of artist-led storytelling to bring attention back to savoir-faire after years of online exposure.

For its 180th anniversary campaign in June, Loewe, for example, chose to draw parallels to craftsmanship with a film assembled using 2,000 watercolour paintings from 10 different artists, led by illustrator and designer Joanna Blémont.

Hermès, as well, selected its self-proclaimed theme for 2025, “Drawn to Craft” to highlight drawing as the root of design. As part of that initiative, the brand hired Martinon to create store displays for its Lugano, Switzerland shop, in part because landscapes frequently surface in her art, she said. She designed the displays to look like an artist’s studio overlooking local mountains and trees, and hand-painted every detail, from the wallpaper to individual book covers.

The partnership continued this summer, when Hermès enlisted Martinon to create illustrations for its entire website, from the homepage to product description pages. Martinon hand-drew and cut out each element, including horses, apples and silk scarves, which were then animated as a moveable collage. Everything from the grain of the paper to imperfect pencil strokes was visible.

“When you draw by hand, accidents happen with the tool, it’s not perfectly clean,” she said. “All of these things might look like defects, but actually they create that particular sensibility.”

Artists’ unique styles can help to further highlight a brand’s codes, too. The Ffern team, for example, dreams up a different world as the basis for each of its seasonal fragrances. From there, it recruits filmmakers and a variety of artists to bring the universe of each scent to life across different formats. For its upcoming autumn 2026 scent, Moonlit Heather, the brand worked with painter Jackie Morris, who produced a watercolour painting of a hare jumping over a heather moor under the moon. Every customer that orders the fragrance will also receive a poster version of the painting.

“The idea is that [the artists are] creating works and paintings that bring the world that’s contained inside the bottle to life,” said Mears.

Getting Artist Partnerships Right

Working with emerging artists has several advantages. Not only are they more affordable than big-name talents, but they also may be more open to long-term partnerships and have a deeper understanding of a brand’s roots, particularly if they have a connection to a brand’s hometown.

Somerset, England-based Ffern, for instance, has cultivated a network of largely UK-based artists who have a pre-existing understanding of the landscape and stories the brand draws from. Similarly, British womenswear and homeware label Toast partners with numerous UK-based artisans; this summer, it worked with UK artist Emma Carlow, whose techniques are rooted in British folk heritage, to design shirts, dresses and bandanas using her paper cut-out motifs inspired by animals and foliage.

The goal with these collaborations, whether designing a new pattern or creating a line of ceramics, is to create something new and additive that could not exist without both parties’ combined vision.

“If we were to work together on a pattern, you’d want the content of those drawings and paintings to work really organically and thoughtfully with the actual design of the garment, not just be slapped on there,” said Richer La Flèche, who hand-painted two corsets as part of her collaboration with Salter House.

To ensure a truly collaborative project, brands also need to ensure they’re giving their artist partners enough free rein to bring their unique perspective to the table. In working with Chanel and Hermès, for example, Martinon said she felt “the brands were very open to receiving proposals” for what the final product would look like, which enabled her to suggest ideas and work more freely, and discuss concepts that enabled them to “push the project a little further,” she said.

Still, it’s a balance: The clearer brands are on the story they’re trying to convey, the easier it can be for them to give artist partners creative license to produce their own take on that world, too.

“We tell the whole story and paint a picture of that world and whichever aspects of that they’re most excited about, they will lean into,” said Mears. “We really let them lead us.”