Artificial intelligence (AI) has already touched nearly every corner of the fashion business, from higher education to supply chain to design: Gucci uses it in data analytics, Prada in marketing initiatives, Collina Strada in print creation, to name just a few examples. Even the most analog in the trade — the brands who pride themselves on craftsmanship and handmade luxury — are not just entertaining it, but also finding ways to incorporate it into their work in a way that doesn’t threaten their value proposition.
Earlier this month, at a press conference at the Teatro Piccolo in Milan, Brunello Cucinelli presented his newest project, BrunelloCucinelli.ai, an AI-powered venture made possible through a bespoke platform (dubbed Solomei AI) created by a team of researchers and engineers “to explore possible ways to adopt AI in our activities” without compromising “human values” and “combining human creativity with the potential offered by technology.”
The brand is positioning this new site as a first-of-its-kind design, abandoning pages, menus and an index to “design something totally different and innovative,” according to Francesco Bottigliero, the brand’s chief of humanistic technology, “that allows content to be freed up.” To be clear, it’s not another platform to drive sales or push product: Its purpose is to highlight the history and philosophy behind the brand, not just for loyal consumers, but for people “who want to know a little more about [the brand],” Cucinelli told the audience.
“We have always tried to keep a website dedicated to the company’s philosophy, to life and to what we do,” he continued. “We have always tried not to see online only as a way to sell. It’s also a way to present the company. Our way of presenting our company starts, first of all, with philosophy.”
Image: Courtesy of Brunello Cucinelli
Instead of pages and menus, visitors can scroll through an endless array of content — all generated by AI — covering everything from Cucinelli’s history to think pieces on sustainability. (The website is compliant with all accessibility regulations, and will soon implement “voice commands for people who have visual problems,” Cucinelli explained.) Much of said AI-generated content is accompanied by hand-sketched illustrations (“we liked that [the drawings] were manual,” Cucinelli said, adding that “sixty percent of everything we do in the company is done with the hands”), as well as music created by Piero Salvatori but orchestrated by AI. Users can type in questions, from straightforward ones like “Is cashmere a fabric?” to more in-depth queries such as “What does Cucinelli think about racial diversity?,” in an inquiry box, and receive AI-generated answers.
“We’ve designed a system that understands the visitor’s intentions and adapts to them,” Bottigliero said. “It answers questions and then offers content, such as images and text, for visitors to browse. During tests, we noticed that a new type of interaction was being established as if the exchange were infinite because the site adapts directly to the user.” (The AI won’t answer inquiries about topics that don’t relate to the brand or Brunello — queries about trend forecasts, political views or other designers, for example, are off-limits.)
Photo: Courtesy of Brunello Cucinelli
Cucinelli — alongside Bottigliero, his daughter Carolina (co-president and co-creative director of the brand) and Massimo de Vico Fallani (an architect and longtime friend of the founder) — gave a personal demo of the website during the press conference. The group emphasized that, though it’s powered by AI, the aim is to keep human creativity at the forefront.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What if we used human creativity and artificial intelligence to try and imagine a new generation of websites?’ This is what we did in this project,” Bottigliero said. “Imagine being able to build a technology that allows you to liberate the contents of a website, and that allows you to create a dynamic composition, following new concepts.”
Photo: Courtesy of Brunello Cucinelli
Ironically, the inspiration behind Solomei AI traces back to the very antithesis of artificial intelligence: a library. In 2021, as part of Cucinelli’s ongoing project revamping Solomeo, Italy — a small village between Florence and Rome that’s home to the brand’s operations and its School of Crafts — the designer announced plans to build a Universal Library, which will carry books from all over the world, focusing on the subjects of philosophy, architecture, literature, poetry and craftsmanship. Cucinelli pondered who the modern equivalent of Zenodoto, the first director of the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, would be, and this sparked the idea of producing a platform that answers questions about different texts, without providing a means to the full books themselves. This evolved into incorporating new technology into the brand.
In the future, there are plans to incorporate Solomei AI to into the e-commerce business. How that takes shape is still unknown (to the public), but Cucinelli teased that AI will “give us a big advantage in sales” if the brand focuses on consumers’ tendencies to pull images from the internet when shopping.
Even though Cucinelli is leading a new digital-forward dawn for the brand, the designer understands those who may be skeptical. He was transparent about his own hesitancies: “I’m passionate about new technology, but I don’t understand it. Some of my colleagues use it, but I’m not connected. I don’t want to be connected, because I have the impression that technology is a gift from the Creator, but sometimes it could also steal the soul that the Creator has given us.”
Disclosure: Brunello Cucinelli paid for Fashionista’s travel and accommodations to attend and cover the BrunelloCucinelli.ai press conference.
Source: Fashionista.com
