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This week, a look at how AI is beginning to be used in fashion curricula, the “critical thinking gap” forming among fashion students, and what effect this will have on the industry’s talent pipeline.
AI is already touching many parts of the fashion industry, on both the consumer and business sides. But not everyone is happy about that development.
In recent weeks, there have been a number of incidents where commencement speakers at college graduations mentioned AI and were met with jeers and boos from the students in attendance. Much of that negative reaction is motivated by the sense that AI is going to eliminate jobs just as new graduates are about to join the workforce, a supposition supported by Yale researchers.
Glossy spoke to several fashion educators from fashion design schools about how this dynamic is playing out in fashion, how AI is being used in the classroom and what the talent pipeline looks like in fashion, since the graduates of today will be the leaders shaping the industry tomorrow.
For Jason Schupbach, the new president of FIT, managing students’ expectations regarding AI is just one part of a larger shift he sees in the field: Creative careers are undervalued. Schupbach cited FIT’s own data, collected in recent months through broad surveys and released this week, showing that 87% of Americans believe the cost of higher education is a barrier for students in creative industries. Similarly, 71% of U.S. adults say AI has made it more difficult to find employment in creative industries.
“And yet the creative industry, including fashion, is $1.4 trillion of the economy — bigger than manufacturing and bigger than construction,” Schupbach said. “We want to make FIT into a creative career lab and give students the skills they need to go into the field.”
Schupbach said AI, along with the wastefulness and lack of sustainability in fashion, is among the biggest concerns students have about the industry. To that end, FIT has a new organization called the AURA Committee, standing for “AI Usage, Responsibility and Adaptation.” The committee, made up of staff, administrators and faculty, crafts policies and guardrails around the use of AI in the school.
Among other guidelines, the policies specify three levels of AI use in the classroom: Open Courses, where AI use is freely encouraged; Conditional Courses, where AI is allowed in select, limited cases at the instructor’s direction; and Closed Courses, where AI use is forbidden.
There are also classes like CT380: AI-Assisted Design, specialized micro-courses on topics like using AI for styling frequent events, and discussions about AI capabilities with visiting companies like Google and IBM.
“It’s a very frothy moment with a new technology shaking things up,” Schupbach said. “Right now, things are up in the air. We’re all learning it together. There’s real fear about jobs being lost, IP being stolen, doomsday scenarios. We don’t know exactly where things will land, but it will settle into something in the coming years, and we’re trying to be prepared for it.”
Other educational institutions are similarly trying to prepare their students for these big changes. Parsons, for example, launched a collaborative initiative with Adobe this year called “Not Generated.” Parsons faculty and Adobe creative teams are collaborating on research into the changing creative landscape driven by AI. That has already led to campus-wide symposiums on the use of AI and has allowed Parsons students to access and experiment with new AI prototypes.
“Because every Parsons student is already working with Adobe’s creative ecosystem, we can move beyond foundational skills and focus on what’s next — how generative AI can expand their creative voice, strengthen the quality and impact of their work, and advance a responsible, human-centered approach to design,” said Eric Snowden, svp of design at Adobe.
But AI in the classroom has its drawbacks. AK Brown, a fashion media relations manager and former fashion professor at Stevens – The Institute of Business and Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, said there were clear negative effects of the rise of AI in her classroom. (Brown left Stevens in December 2025.)
“AI in the classroom is a blessing and a curse, and often at the same time,” Brown said. “As an educator, it was genuinely useful for analyzing curriculum gaps against where the industry was actually heading. That kind of bird’s-eye view led to real outcomes. On the other side, students leaned on AI in ways that quietly eroded critical thinking, and many assumed their professors couldn’t tell. We could.”
This is a growing concern in the fashion business — that AI is creating a “critical thinking gap” and that what businesses will value most is the kind of high-level strategic decision-making that AI can’t deliver.
Schupbach said this is something fashion schools are best equipped to handle.
“I was at SXSW this year, and the CEOs were concerned about how new graduates will learn critical thinking,” Schupbach said. “I got defensive. That’s what we do! Our faculty wake up every day and teach the students soft skills, critical thinking, how to approach problems at a high level. That’s their job.”
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