Three days in Bella Center, and nobody wanted to argue with me about whether AI belongs in fashion imagery.
Twelve months ago that was the whole conversation, and it was exhausting. At CIFF 67 the subject came up maybe twice, and both times it changed within a minute. Something has shifted, and the questions that replaced it are better.
CIFF counted 1,100 brands in the halls between 3 and 5 August, with 194 hosted buyers and media. We were there as an official partner and we came without a stand. The brands have the stands, and a good number of those brands are ours to look after all year. Our three days went on walking, sitting down with people and listening to what they are actually worried about.
Here is what that sounded like.
The argument about AI is finished
What people asked was operational, and it came in three versions.
How do I scale this without my catalogue starting to look like everyone else's? Who checks the output before it reaches a product page? How much of it can I use before my customer feels lied to?
The third one is the difficult question, and there is data sitting underneath it. Seventy one percent of shoppers say they are suspicious of images that look AI generated, and 44 percent say they avoid brands they suspect of using AI (Salsify, 2025). In the same market, 41 percent of Gen Z shoppers use AI chat to shop for fashion every week (Boston Consulting Group, 2025). The same customer uses the machine to find things and then refuses to be sold to by it.
No model release resolves that. A process does: a brief that states what the machine is allowed to touch, a human accountable for every frame that leaves the studio, and a clear answer for the client about where the machine did the work. Seventeen years and more than 140 fashion brands later, that is the part I will defend in any room.
Nobody puts the returns number on a slide
The second conversation was quieter, and it usually arrived after the first one.
Everybody has a number for what sells. Far fewer people say out loud what comes back, and why. Fashion return rates climbed 3.0 percentage points between 2022 and 2024 (Coresight Research, 2025), and a large share of that gap is a promise the product page made that the parcel could not keep.
Which is why I stopped reading conversion on its own a long time ago.
Conversion minus returns, weighted by margin, is the number that pays salaries.
A set of images that lifts add to cart while quietly pushing returns up has moved stock around Europe at your expense.
What a good shop floor still does better
The best conversation of the week had nothing to do with technology.
Someone walked me through the Dutch offline market: dozens of multi brand department stores, most of them in smaller cities, most of them still shaped by the taste of the person who owns them. Curation with a name attached to it. Later the same evening a multi brand store in Arezzo came up, and its buyer, and interiors that people travel to see.
Both stories are about the two things a good shop floor hands a customer for free. Somebody chose this for you. And you can touch it.
In a store the customer settles the question with their hands. They feel the weight of the knit, check how the seam is finished, carry the colour towards the daylight by the door. Online there is nothing to touch, so the photograph has to do the work of the fitting room. It has to say what the material is and how the garment sits on a body. Get that right and one set of images lifts sales and takes returns down at the same time. Make it prettier than the truth and you pay for it twice.
One wardrobe, three lives
The shift I did not expect from CIFF 67 was in the product itself.
Swim, active and everyday are collapsing into a single drawer. CIFF gave a whole hall to that, handing C Hall to PARAISO Miami Swim Week, which is a confident way of saying the category is now a pillar of the fair rather than a summer visitor.
For a brand it means one garment has to hold up in three contexts. For a studio it means the same thing, without three separate shoots and three separate budgets. That is a content operations question long before it becomes a photography question.
Three days of talking
Thank you to the CIFF team for having gopackshot as an official partner of CIFF 67.
Thank you to everyone who gave us half an hour and then stayed for the harder half of the conversation. Those three days of talking were the whole reason we came, and we flew home with a list of things to build, which is the only souvenir worth carrying through an airport.
