Issue #009 | The Boiling Frog

Valentino's year of AI, read six months on

09:00 New York · 14:00 London · 21:00 Beijing

Between 18 November and 4 December 2025, Maison Valentino released the films of its DeVain Digital Creative Project. The campaign, under the creative direction of Alessandro Michele, distributed the new Valentino Garavani DeVain handbag across nine international artists. Five worked with AI. Four did not. Schön Magazine, in its launch coverage of 1 December, read the bag’s name as a play on the tension between the divine and the vain.

The reception split along the same line as the production method. Under the AI films, the comment thread collapsed toward a familiar register: anti-taste, anti-class, anti-luxury. Under the human-made work, comments returned to the language of luxury endorsement: classy, beautiful, this is what we pay for. The brand kept publishing. At the centre of the storm, Valentino chose silence.

The visible reading at the time was that Valentino had overestimated its customers’ tolerance to AI-generated media. Six months later, a different reading offers itself. The frog being tested was not the customer.

The Underlying Condition

The conditions that produced the decision are documented in the public filings. Valentino’s 2024 revenue stood at €1.3 billion, down 3 per cent year on year. EBITDA fell 22 per cent, to €246 million. By autumn 2025, the house had breached the covenants of a €530 million loan signed in 2024 with a syndicate of Italian banks, including the state investment fund Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. On 10 September 2025, Kering and Mayhoola amended their shareholder agreement to defer Kering’s path to full acquisition until at least 2028. By 16 October, the shareholders had committed €100 million in capital injection, scheduled to complete by 10 December in two tranches.

The strategic position was visible to anyone in the room. The marketing budget needed to come down; the Q4 holiday window was the last commercial lever before year-end. AI offered two solutions at once: dramatically cheaper production, and a narrative of avant-garde innovation that could be packaged as creative ambition rather than cost reduction.

Riccardo Bellini began as chief executive on 1 September 2025. He had previously led Maison Margiela and Chloé before taking the managing director role at Mayhoola, Valentino’s majority owner. The DeVain Digital Creative Project, under Michele’s creative direction, was already in the pipeline when he arrived. The campaign’s release window closed on 4 December, when the capital injection meant to stabilise the house had not yet been delivered.

The consultancy class had spent three years escalating its framing. McKinsey’s 2023 paper named a $275 billion opportunity for AI in apparel, fashion, and luxury. By the State of Fashion 2026 report published in November 2025, the same publisher described AI as “a business necessity” rather than a competitive edge. However, a crucial boundary was ignored: that original paper included an explicit architectural caveat, noting that generative tools are “most helpful when applied to lower-funnel marketing channels... as opposed to more prestigious brand-building communications.” For a house entering refinancing, the pressure to adopt a “necessity” is structural.

The Trajectory

The 2025 sequence reads, in retrospect, like a year-long test of how much the customer would accept. Each step was modest. The compound effect was not.

In March, Valentino published its collaboration with EDGLRD, the studio founded by Harmony Korine. The work used AI tools within a recognisable studio signature; Korine was the visible author. Reception was mixed but held within the boundaries of artistic experiment.

In May, a giant white-and-mint cat appeared next to the Valentino store on Fifth Avenue, accompanied by the caption “curious cat come to life at the Valentino store in New York.” It was a fake-out-of-home composite: 3D animation laid onto real Manhattan footage. The customer could see the trick; the trick was visual playfulness, not authorship replacement. Comments turned playful. A few voices murmured about classy brand etiquette, which was within absorption range.

This was the period before Bellini’s arrival.

In September, Valentino released its collaboration with Vans, again with EDGLRD, accompanied by an explicit disclosure: the campaign was generated using AI, with the informed consent of the depicted talents. The work itself did not look like AI; the customer was told it was. That single piece of information shifted how the work was valued. Many comments remained supportive of the studio. Others recoiled. AI is not art, customers wrote. AI does not deserve five-hundred-dollar shoes. There was a gap between the work’s craft and the public’s preconception of AI as fast, cheap, and effortless, which the candid disclosure could not close..

On 30 September, the brand released a Highsnobiety-produced video using conventional methods. Whether this was course correction or scheduled rotation, it landed as a return to safer ground.

The DeVain Digital Creative Project went live on 18 November with the first AI film from the project’s five AI artists. The film drew roughly 850,000 views. On 1 December came the work by Total Emotional Awareness, which drew around 833,000 views and the bulk of the press attention. A third AI film drew approximately 380,000. Two non-AI films drew roughly 400,000 and 260,000. Schön Magazine, carrying the launch announcement on 1 December, observed that “given the complexities and controversies of generative art, the House has been explicitly transparent about the process.” The brand knew. The brand chose to publish.

On 2 December, the BBC published its coverage of the controversy. NY Post and Business of Fashion followed within days. The BBC reported approaching Valentino for comment; no statement was issued in response.

The frog had been in warming water all year. Each step lowered the artist’s authorship signal and raised the algorithm’s. By autumn the kitchen had a financial reason to keep the burner on. The leadership change in September was the moment the temperature could have been lowered. The burner was turned up instead.

What the Dashboard Could Not See

The numbers that the marketing department saw, and the numbers that the marketing department should have seen, were hardly the same numbers.

The AI films in the DeVain project drew roughly three times the view volume of their non-AI counterparts. From inside the dashboard, the campaign would have read as performing exceptionally. The views were real. So were the impressions. So was the press coverage. The brand had achieved, by any conventional metric, what marketing campaigns are supposed to achieve.

The dashboard could not distinguish what the views were for. They were for watching the brand fail in real time. They were for the comment thread, the screenshots, the trade-press post-mortems. Engagement metrics record attention. They do not distinguish admiration from disgust. In luxury, where the entire premium is built on social desirability, this distinction is not a nuance, but the whole game.

Valentino’s revenue continued downward through 2025, tracking a double-digit decline by WWD’s September reporting. The handbag campaign that should have anchored Q4 holiday sales lost its window to brand damage. The flagship product budget had been spent against the brand’s own core buyers. The dashboard recorded the views. The accounts recorded what those views had cost.

The Verdict

In luxury, the campaign is not voice alone but part of the product. The customer paying the premium is not paying for a handbag in isolation; they are paying for the aesthetic and cultural construction in which the handbag is positioned, and paying for the identity they cultivate. The campaign is part of that construction. When AI generates the campaign, AI generates part of what the customer is paying for.

This is why the diagnostic line is not that AI is incompatible with luxury marketing. The line is more precise.

Photography was once dismissed as mechanical reproduction. It became art when individuals (for example, Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson, and Lange) demonstrated that the medium could carry singular human vision. AI is approximately five years old in its current generative form. It is plausible that twenty years from now, AI-as-medium will have produced artists whose signatures survive algorithmic mediation, and luxury houses will commission those artists as they once commissioned Avedon. That world is not this one.

The relevant line under current conditions is not AI versus non-AI. The relevant line is authorship visibility. Luxury campaigns work when the customer can see, through the work, a chain of identifiable human authorship that justifies the premium. They fail when the chain is broken or hidden. EDGLRD’s earliest Valentino work passed because Korine’s studio was the visible author. The Vans collaboration drew murmurs because the disclosure of AI use existed at all; the work itself was not the problem, the framing was. DeVain failed because AI itself became the conceptual centre, and the framing made the algorithm the headline. Five artists’ names appeared as labour. The brand signed the campaign. The customer saw a machine.

The artist split between AI and non-AI may have been deliberate, a structural enactment of the bag’s divine-and-vain naming. If so, the design failed in execution: the non-AI work read as luxury; the AI work did not. The conceptual gesture collapsed at the moment customers encountered it.

There is a form of dignity in the brand’s posture across the controversy: anticipating the criticism, releasing anyway, meeting backlash with silence. This is the dignity of a maison that does not retreat from its own decisions. Dignity, however, only protects the surface. This decision did not merely touch the surface; it reached the foundation. The house wagered its own identity on a test of customer tolerance, and the test came back negative.

What looks like a marketing error is a governance error. When an institution uses its brand identity as the stake and treats viewers as denominators in a test, the audience will likely pull the institution from the altar. When AI’s role is to replace the luxury brand’s voice rather than to support it, the deployment itself endangers the identity that the brand sells.

The frog being boiled, in the end, turned out to be the brand.

The houses that succeed under current conditions are those that draw the line between AI as back-office tool and AI as front-of-house voice. Where that line is drawn, and how it is enforced, belongs to the Dossier later this week.

Sutong

The Velvet Scalpel