In one image for Jil Sander, a model lifts her face to a large, stone head, her eyes closed as if in a kiss, producing a mysteriously intimate moment.
Another image for Prada is a busy patchwork of blondes and browns, formed by the heads and shoulders of a crowd of models, all dressed in neutrals, as seen from above.
None of it is real: not the models, the clothes or the campaigns. None of the brands were involved in the making of the images, which are the work of Sybille de Saint Louvent, who describes herself as an independent creative director and creates her fake fashion campaigns — some only still imagery, others including video — using AI.
“I just saw the AI situation as an amazing tool to work with,” she said. “As a creative, you can wait for a client to call you and to set up a campaign, but it costs a lot of money, lots of time and a lot of people.”
The AI campaigns, which she centres mostly on fashion names but has also done for brands like Apple and Bic pens, have brought her attention online, from social-media users as well as fashion and luxury labels themselves. On Feb. 25, she posted a new campaign for Gucci she said was commissioned by the brand, which held its Fall/Winter 2025 show the same day. Gucci gave her “carte blanche to create a series of visuals exploring the theme of duality” in the show, she said. Her video opens with a seated woman seen only from behind, looking at a mirror reflecting not her image but the back of a man similarly seated.
Since generative AI went mainstream, brands have been eyeing it to produce everything from digital models to social content to marketing campaigns. The early results still looked computer generated, but as the technology improves, its output has grown more deceptively realistic. De Saint Louvent’s campaigns offer a glimpse of what the future of AI marketing could increasingly look like.
Marketing is one industry experts believe will be heavily impacted by the spread of the technology. Back in 2023, McKinsey highlighted sales and marketing as one of four business functions that would reap the most value from uses of generative AI. Brands quickly started testing it for tasks like writing marketing copy, but creating imagery was also high on the agenda. In The State of Fashion 2024 by The Business of Fashion and McKinsey, 26 percent of executives surveyed said their companies were at least experimenting with it for visual marketing content.
De Saint Louvent, who said she’s been in the creative industry for more than a decade and currently works as a freelancer doing creative consulting for brands, first started toying with AI about a year and a half ago. It wasn’t until about three months ago, however, that she began using it seriously. A familiar experience for many creatives who work on shoots all the time, she said, is to have a lot of ideas but no outlet for them. She initially set herself a challenge of producing one AI campaign a day to post to Instagram, though she has since relaxed her pace.
AI hasn’t replaced traditional shoots for her. She still does creative direction on physical sets. But she said sometimes she’ll use AI to “pre-validate an idea,” particularly when there’s a lot of money involved or there’s an unusual creative brief. Having the AI version lets the client see what the end result might look like.
What AI can’t do is generate the ideas and feelings she wants to convey.
“It’s not going to replace the emotion,” she said.
In that regard, de Saint Louvent’s perspective is similar to that of other creatives who’ve talked about using AI, whether for design or marketing. AI may produce the imagery but a human still needs to provide the concept and direction. When Casablanca used AI for a campaign in 2023, for example, founder Charaf Tajer said the brand still did the same research and storyboarding that would have been necessary for a traditional campaign. For de Saint Louvent, the idea always comes first, and once she has a clear vision, she tries to elicit it from the AI. Sometimes it only takes a couple tries to get it right, but other times she’s never able to.
Her fake fashion campaigns tend not to focus so much on the products involved but rather on stories. (“You buy an identity, not only a product,” she noted.) Her work tends to feel slightly dreamy and surreal, like one imagined campaign image for Victoria Beckham depicting a coat sitting upright in a plush chair without anyone inside it. She said she writes highly detailed prompts because she has a precise idea of what she wants to see. If you just enter something like “beautiful girl standing on the street of a clean city,” you get a cliché of a tall blonde, a result of the way AI can easily reproduce biases if the user isn’t careful.
She manually edits images as well to make small modifications and for the “chromatic perspective.” Her colour palette leans toward neutrals and soft, tonal shades.
Her AI campaigns have gotten her some new clients. A few have come to her asking her to create a campaign that could represent their brand. One requested a mix of photography and AI.
“It surely opened discussion [from] many brands, not only the ones I was making fake campaigns about,” she said.
Companies are likely thinking about what role AI can play in their future campaigns.
