In fashion too, the patterns are changing

While the world of fashion debates whether AI will boost or diminish creativity, one thing is clear: its rising influence across design, production and storytelling cannot be ignored

- Pooja Singh

Robots walked alongside actor Tamannaah Bhatia during the Falguni Shane Peacock show in November; and (below) a model's digital twin in an H&M campaign.

Designer Raghavendra Rathore started his morning by "feeding" an AI chatbot over 50,000 words.

The monologue covered his formative years, building an eponymous fashion house over three decades, and the influences on his work, including his signature creations, such as the Jodhpur bandhgala. "I am educating it (AI) about myself. There will come a time when you won't need me to be present in an interview; my avatar will answer exactly the way I speak and think," says Rathore, who regularly talks to the bot, a general tool. "It's thinking more like me today than it did yesterday."

A tech enthusiast, Rathore has been experimenting with AI for the past four years. He uses it as an archive keeper ("the different motifs of a leaf or silhouettes of suits I have designed"), a memory keeper ("it can tell what I was doing a year ago"), and, just for fun, a "what-if scenario" maker ("how different would my design language have been if I was in another country at the age of 9?"). Even as a "quiet design" partner. "It doesn't tell me what to create. I speak to it, it organises the thoughts scattered across days, helps refine choices and aligns them, and then it answers with patterns I hadn't considered," Rathore says.

He gives the example of a client's request to include his granddaughter’s painting in a suit. After several interactions with AI and the design team, the print of the painting became the lining. "Used with intention, AI doesn't confine creativity. It stretches it," says Rathore. "Perhaps this is how fashion will evolve—not by discarding tradition, but by letting a new form of intelligence breathe alongside it."