Is Big Tech Fashion’s Biggest Wannabe?

“What Anthropic is doing is interesting because it’s trying to give something intangible a physical culture,” says Tom Garland, founder of brand consultancy Edition + Partners. “You can’t ‘photograph’ AI, and it’s difficult to dramatize. So pop-ups, objects, merch, printed matter — those things give it texture. They make it feel more legible in the real world.”

Tech as a cultural statement

Where Anthropic leaned on fashion’s pop-up model to build cultural cachet and trust, rival chatbot maker OpenAI has been commissioning creatives directly from fashion to help craft its first brand storytelling campaign for ChatGPT. Its first three-part film series Everyday Moments, released last September, was directed by Miles Jay (known for fashion and music work including Adidas and Nike campaigns), with stills by fashion photographer Samuel Bradley (who’s shot for Vogue and worked with the likes of Burberry and Lacoste) and styling by Carlos Nazario, whose portfolio spans Gucci, Prada, Marni, and more.

It’s part of a broader trend of tech poaching fashion talent, which several sources in the creative industries believe has been ramping up in recent months. Garland says his agency has experienced rising demand from tech brands coming to him with the same brief: we know what the product does, but how do we make people care? Or, how do we stop looking like a company and start looking like a brand?

“A lot of these businesses have spent years overindexing on functionality, clarity, and performance language. Now, they are realizing that distinctiveness lives somewhere else, too. It lives in codes, taste, tone, casting, image systems, language, physical experience, and community,” Garland continues. “They are looking to fashion and lifestyle, because those worlds are much better at turning products into symbols and are used to doing it at speed. Every time a new collection comes out, we are expected to understand what the consumer wants in that moment and produce something relevant, over and over again.”

OpenAI’s films position the chatbot as a supportive, everyday presence that aids users’ real-life interactions, at the same time eschewing highly polished futuristic AI visuals for a lo-fi human feel.