Vogue World came to Milan to celebrate Italian craftsmanship. Lovely. Except that, somewhere between the opera, the couture and the celebration of everything beautifully human about fashion, there were robots.
Because apparently in 2026 we can no longer organise a fashion event without reminding everyone that artificial intelligence has entered the room. Even when the entire point of the evening is supposedly to celebrate the things AI cannot quite replace: human hands, craftsmanship, creativity, time and skill.
If you watched the livestream and found yourself thinking, “What exactly am I watching?”, you were not alone.
Vogue World Milan was spectacular, expensive, packed with celebrities, music, ballet, opera and fashion. It was also, at times, completely baffling.
The premise was to celebrate Italian craftsmanship at a moment when artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the creative industries. Vogue Italia’s Francesca Ragazzi described the idea as particularly meaningful “in the era of artificial intelligence”. A perfectly reasonable statement, until you remember that robots were then introduced into the show.
And the contradiction became even more entertaining when the livestream opened with an advertisement for Meta Glasses. Meta is one of Vogue World’s sponsors, alongside OpenAI and Eli Lilly & Company, the pharmaceutical company associated with GLP-1 medications.
So here we are: celebrating human craftsmanship, with some of the biggest companies shaping the technology-driven future helping to pay for the party.
It is difficult not to see the irony.
But it would also be unfair to pretend the show was a disaster. It was entertaining. Very entertaining, actually.
There was opera. Ballet. Alicia Keys performing Donna Summer. Jennifer Lopez standing in the middle of a room with the effortless ability to make it look as though the entire building had been constructed specifically for her entrance. Vittoria Ceretti revisiting her now-famous Olympics moment. Gigi Hadid dressed like fashion royalty
.
And then there was Adriano Celentano, with that song that sounds like English but isn’t. Somehow, it felt completely appropriate.
The clothes were just as chaotic. Prada Fall/Winter 2018 appeared alongside Bottega Veneta Fall/Winter 2026, with Moncler puffers and looks pulled from different decades and different fashion universes.
There wasn’t necessarily a clear chronological or aesthetic story. It felt more like someone had opened the enormous archive of Italian fashion, looked around and said: “You know what? Let’s take all of it.”
And perhaps that is precisely what Vogue World has become.
It is no longer simply a fashion show. It is an event designed to generate attention.
When Vogue World launched in 2022, the timing made sense. It was created partly to celebrate Vogue’s 130th anniversary and to bring some energy back to fashion week after the pandemic. People had spent months staring at screens. They wanted to go outside. They wanted to see other people. They wanted fashion to feel physical again.
Four years later, the problem is different.
We don’t need to be persuaded to look at our screens. We need to be persuaded not to look away.
And Vogue World understands that.
A major fashion event today cannot simply show beautiful clothes. It needs celebrities, spectacle, music, technology, sponsors and, ideally, several moments that can be turned into social media content before the evening is even over.
Fashion is no longer just about what happens on the runway. It is about what happens after the runway, when millions of people begin reposting, commenting, reacting, arguing and turning a two-hour event into thousands of pieces of content.
Which makes Vogue World rather fascinating.
Because underneath all the spectacle is a very real contradiction facing the fashion industry.
We keep telling audiences that human craftsmanship matters. That something made by hand has a value that cannot be replicated by a machine. That creativity, individuality and imperfection are precisely what make fashion meaningful.
At the same time, we are entering a world where AI can generate images, imitate aesthetics, produce text, create music and increasingly participate in creative processes that were once exclusively human.
And fashion wants both.
It wants the human touch.
It also wants the future.
It wants authenticity.
It also wants technology.
It wants craftsmanship.
And it definitely wants the clicks.
Perhaps that is why the robots didn’t actually feel as out of place as they initially seemed.
They were almost a metaphor for the whole event.
Vogue World Milan wasn’t just celebrating what fashion has been. It was showing us the slightly confused, spectacular, sponsor-filled, celebrity-packed world fashion is trying to navigate now.
Italian craftsmanship, AI, opera, ballet, celebrities, nostalgia, technology and an enormous amount of clothing all sharing the same stage.
And, ultimately, one very simple question remains:
Are we watching fashion celebrate the human future, or watching it slowly prepare us for an artificial one?
Maybe Vogue doesn’t have the answer yet.
But it certainly knows how to keep us watching.
