Vogue World closed its Milan edition this week with a troupe of robots — perhaps a preview of what’s coming when the event descends on San Francisco next year.
Vogue World is the magazine’s annual traveling spectacle, now in its fifth year: part runway show, part celebrity showcase, part variety hour, part ad-sales opportunity, staged in a different city each time. It has run through New York, London, Paris, and Hollywood. This year’s Milan edition was marketed as a tribute to Italian craftsmanship and “the human touch” in an age of technology, which makes what happened next a little strange.
During the act titled The Age of Intelligence, humanoid robots made by the Chinese firm Unitree walked into the Galleria to Gigi D’Agostino’s “L’Amour Toujours.” They waved their arms in the air, imploring onlookers to clap. One did a lasso. They were not wearing clothes. The pained expression of Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Valentino, quickly went viral.
I haven’t seen a single thing about the actual fashion that was presented at Vogue World Milan. Instead, everyone is talking about the robots. (These same robots have been making headlines worldwide for their dance moves, and for falling and breaking.) Similar robots turned up on the runway at London Fashion Week, which is happening now.
Vogue turned heads earlier this year when it announced that the next edition will be in San Francisco, arguably one of the least stylish cities in the United States. The timing isn’t coincidental. Anna Wintour has aligned herself ever more closely with the tech barons of our time, and Vogue World Milan was itself sponsored in part by Meta Glasses, with additional support from OpenAI.
It was one of those moments that reveals how thoroughly tech exists in a bubble, and that not everyone is happy with the rapid adoption of new technology, or by Vogue cozying up to the symbols of the insanely rich — and only getting richer — tech titans during a cost-of-living crisis. That’s before you get to AI, mass surveillance, the displacement of labor, and the energy crisis, all of them overseen by the same titans. For some, a robot on a runway is further proof of what is going wrong in the world right now.
“I’m annoyed by the celebrities cheering the whole thing,” one tech founder wrote me on Instagram. “It’s sick and gloom. People are literally losing jobs and livelihoods because of these things. They need to stop encouraging it. What’s it even modeling? Headphones?”
One fashion reporter friend simply said “No,” when I asked for thoughts on the robots and Vogue World San Francisco. Jason Johnson, founder of Culture Impact Agency, noted that Vogue has been trying to build a relationship with Silicon Valley for at least the past decade, highlighting when Jony Ive co-hosted the Met Gala back in 2015. The dancing robots at Vogue World Milan were inevitable, then, as is Vogue World San Francisco and as was Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, getting the splashy Vogue wedding cover and co-hosting the 2026 Met Gala.
“Publications are figuring out new ways to make money and tech has money,” he told me. “Vogue has the cultural influence and access that those tech people want.” Both sides win in the end, he said.
Still, something about the way Vogue is going about this feels unnatural.
Muna Ikedionwu, founder of MKEDI, a strategy firm for early-stage startups, said what she found most interesting about the robots is that they don’t fully represent the innovation and progress that’s actually happening in the creative technologist space. “I’ve seen such incredible examples of engineering and AI being used to influence fashion, being used to influence design and art,” she told me, adding that robots walking down the runway doesn’t even scratch the surface of what is happening right now at the intersection of fashion and tech.
She points to the artist duo AA Murakami, who created Olympian Eileen Gu’s dress of bubbles at this year’s Met Gala. They are fashion designers but also engineers, Ikedionwu said, noting a presentation she saw them give recently about how to create an “everlasting bubble.” They are helping to pioneer “emphemeral technology,” she said, “this idea of technology and innovation that speaks to the ephemeral nature or the temporariness of art and humanity and the soul.”
Sure, I guess when you compare it to this, the robots did seem quite boring. Whenever I think about the intersection of fashion and technology, I think about that Spring 2024 Schiaparelli collection, which unveiled a robot baby crafted with Swarovski crystals and a dress made with vintage tech like PC microchips. (I once threatened to wear that dress to Disrupt; see image above.)
Ikedionwu wonders whether this robot performance was a way to make the general public more comfortable with technology and fashion overlapping, a merger that has been underway behind the scenes for years. If so, it didn’t work. But maybe Vogue World is saving all the good stuff for San Francisco.
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