Vogue Features Guess Campaign With AI Generated Model - The World is Mad About It

In case you missed it, the latest issue Vogue 2025 features an AI model in an advert for the first time, and the internet has popped off about it. 

The Guess campaign features a series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a stereotypically beautiful blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper. Upon the image in super small print is a note “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” Skim and you’d have missed it. 

It’s unclear just how much of the image was made with AI, or who signed off both at Guess and Vogue, but Vogue has since stated that the AI model was ‘not an editorial decision’. As you’ve probably guessed, the controversy around this feature is rife for so many reasons. 

Watch our TikTok Breaking this Down

Sounding the Alarm for Beauty Ideals  

Let’s start with the elevation of ridiculous beauty standards here. Tall, blonde, objectively beautiful and the mainstream projected idea of a perfect body, the representation of an ‘ideal’ woman here is such a disappointing and dated cliche. 

She obviously looks like an airbrushed human. Despite this woman looking artificial, it does feel like we’re stepping back to the rife and intense use of airbrushing that we saw mid 2010s, and then had a slight step-back from whilst there were increasing pushes on body positivity and the presentation of real women in fashion. 

But this feels like a dangerous vessel for worrying projections and pressures of beauty that have been on the rise recently. The world is already on fire here. For a while now we have been experiencing a cultural shift where insecurities are preyed on and the commercialisation of beauty has arguably never been bigger.

On social media and in real life, we’re experiencing a huge wave of unattainable beauty standards, amplified with the rise of and ease to access to ozempic, countless trends in injectables and treatments, lack of transparency from celebrities and influencers on work done, tiktok filters making users look skinnier. Beauty and body culture have never been faster moving, easier accessed or more pressurised, and it’s evidently still not enough. 

A key thing this AI generated ideal and the current social beauty pressures have in common is that it generates one specific aesthetic. There has been decades of fighting for diversity on runways for plus size, trans models, disabled models, hijab-wearing models, and we’re met with a lazy, regressive and unimaginative stereotype of perfection. 

The Terrifying AI Generation of Human Standards 

AI is lifting beauty out of something subjective -it’s algorithmic. The concept of beauty is being artificially defined - but is it? Algorithms are fed from somewhere. 

In 2023, we saw AI image generation platform Midjourney develop what ‘the most beautiful women in the world’ look like - the result being four women, all of who are young and white with long hair, symmetrical features, objectively spectacular brows and the same large lips.  At the end of last year, a Brazilian fitness influencer was declared “a perfect 10” by an AI analysis for having “the perfect female body”, according to an AI analysis. Since AI has began generating images, we have been exposed to idealised standards of what women should look like, even broken down by country. 

AI image generators are trained on massive datasets scraped from the internet, including Instagram, fashion sites, stock photos, magazines, and search engines. These datasets reflect the existing biases of the media landscape. So when an AI is asked to generate an image of “a beautiful woman” or “a model,” it’s statistically more likely to output what it’s seen the most — because its idea of “beauty” is literally based on frequency and visual association, not nuance or diversity. So traditional biases are being perpetuated. 

Even datasets built with “neutral” intentions (like LAION or OpenImages) are shaped by decades of colonial, patriarchal, and commercial beauty norms. The systems don’t inherently understand race, age, or gender — they learn correlation. And when media systems already center certain faces, AI just mirrors that.

The whole thing feels like it’s dehumanising women. And that’s a terrifying trend rise in itself at a much wider level as of late. 

At What Cost is This Taking Place?

AI Model generation is a lot cheaper than a real photoshoot. So ethics around beauty removed, what does this mean for how money is being spent by fashion brands? 

Do we think that this means that brands such as Guess will be redistributing creative funds towards garment workers within their supply chains?

Guess currently has a 2/5 ‘Not Good Enough’ score on Good On You, their worst performance being their treatment of people. Its supply chains are muddy, having received a score of 31-40% in the 2023 Fashion Transparency Index. Additionally, there’s no evidence that it supports diversity and inclusion in its supply chain, nor that it ensures its supply chain workers are paid living wages.

It would be interesting to see if the pay off for such a controversial brand strategy was rooted in something transformative, but looking forward with a realistic approach it’s doubtful. 

Dangers to the Modelling and Creative Industry 

ALSO we have countless models on the planet - many whose beauty objectively meets the standards that Guess and Vogue are demonstrating they hold. Cultural moves like this put modelling as a career at risk.

There are a lot of people who work on a photoshoot in addition to a model and a photographer - set designers, stylists, runners, location scouts, creative studio owners, editors - the list is endless. AI doesn’t dream, collaborate, problem-solve or feel. Real shoots are messy and rich - that’s the point. Eliminating humans in favour of digital perfection is pointless and deeply unnecessary.

The debate of whether the development of AI tools and increase in use will help or hinder creativity is becoming increasingly layered and complicated. 

The Backlash is SO Real 

The internet is fired up on this. (Can you tell we are too?)

The campaign and use of it had been met with a load of controversy and questions raised about what this means for Vogue, AI projection of beauty, the dampening of creativity. 

On the other hand, could this huge backlash de-influence the use of AI generated campaigns? We have the opportunity not just to vote with our say but with our wallets. People have already cancelled their subscriptions to Vogues. Guess has also had a recent resurgence fuelled by a new wave of Gen Z customers - the ones making tiktoks about how outrageous this campaign is.