This season’s bestseller? AI. Maybe.

A BOOT OOZES AND MELTS LIKE A CANDLE.

Leather petals and blossoms. Milk pours from a jug in a boot-shape form and develops a cow-hide pattern. A knife cuts into a boot cake, and it rains on a boot-shaped umbrella. This is the first time we’ve used AI in a campaign. Made in collaboration with Daria Mi Studio, it is a creative experiment to see how the process worked, how it fitted for size.

Creatively it feels, as if AI is in its element when it ventures into the surreal, the unconventional. When you want things to do the opposite thing, for real things to become contrary to their nature. Technology is built on exploration, on determining new parameters, of taking another step into the unknown. If it can do this. What else can it do? AI is everywhere.

HOW MANY CONVERSATIONS HAVE YOU HAD THIS YEAR ABOUT AI?

We’ve had a lot.

It’s everywhere and it can be applied, it seems, to almost anything. We’re still trying to get our heads around AI, and what role it will play in the future. How this multi-faceted technology will affect our work, creativity, and the impact it will have on society in general.

There are some clear, positive uses. Its ability to analyse vast amounts of data to predict the development of diseases, manage critical infrastructure like the energy network, or for use in modelling and understanding extreme weather and climate events. On a more personal level, many of us use it already to simplify, summarise, translate and automate in moments. It helps make many mundane tasks, quicker and easier to do. Using generative ai, it can make new things too: code, music, video, text and images.

AI gives us access to more, and faster, but also, it feels overwhelming, ominous, even downright dystopian, especially when you start thinking about the repercussions for the environment.

It also feels like it’s out of control. A wild west effect, driven by ‘for profit’ tech companies, with little consideration for the ethical consequences. Without clear regulations and institutional guardrails, we’ve already seen how the very tech that’s supposed to help also hinders. It’s made to proliferate information, with algorithms that also spreads hate, misinformation, effects political stability, that can be used for all sorts of malicious intent, all the while using more water and energy resources than its technological predecessors.

AI IS A SUPER-SPREADER

Creatively too, AI is contradictory. We now have tools that make creative output more accessible. There’s more content than ever. But with that, it seems, the focus is on the superficial, the surface. It might sound good, but it might not be factual. It might look good, but without the human process is it as meaningful? Creating art is about the lived experience. What happens when the process and the thinking are outsourced?

FASTER. QUICKER.

We get the AI elevator pitch: faster, quicker, cheaper. This sounds so familiar. It’s capitalism, baby. It’s fast fashion. The prioritisation of productivity and output. And whilst we want to ensure that we can keep pace and survive as a brand, by incorporating technology that can help us improve our business, for us and our customers: whether that’s using AI to find issues in the supply chain, personalising and localising marketing materials to help people find the products they desire, we don’t want that to come at the cost of losing meaningful connection with the people we work with, and the people who come to us because of what we represent.

Because we put, being human with all its imperfections, contradictions and care at the heart of everything we do.

It’s why we have consciously built a business around people and their skillsets. It’s why we continue to write our own copy, make our own content with other creatives and handcraft shoes. It’s why we have created a shorter supply chain, so we don’t need additional computational middlemen.

IT'S ALL ABOUT LAYERS

But let’s come full circle, back to the boots that ooze and melt in their fantastical forms. Because ultimately, like all man-made innovations, AI works best when harnessed as a tool.

When we use it in tandem with human purpose, intention, creative and critical thinking. It’s something that should be used selectively. When it can add to or improve. A layer rather than the look.