Last year, AI investment reached unprecedented highs. Nvidia became the world’s first $5 trillion company, the biggest AI players like Meta and Google raised their AI spend from previous forecasts, and OpenAI placed itself at the center of a web of multi-million-dollar deals focused on accelerating AI development.
In 2026, all this spending is likely to yield new products and features that will impact how fashion brands sell online. At the same time, governments are racing to catch up with the pace of development and introduce laws to regulate the sector. Approaches to AI regulation are expected to become even more fragmented across geographies, which experts say places the onus on brands to establish their own AI guardrails and values, fast.
This includes fashion’s approach to using AI models for creative outputs. Expect a bifurcation in approaches to AI for creative in 2026, where brands either reject the tech altogether, or lean into the surreal look it can create.
As they navigate this rapid technological evolution, brands will also lean into consumer tech products that prioritize human connection and warmth. On the consumer side, experts say we’ll likely see last year’s fledgling trend of tech products worn as accessories grow in 2026.
Here are the biggest fashion-tech trends to expect in 2026.
Advertising will enter a new AI era
This year, expect pay-to-play advertising in commerce to change shape, as consumers increasingly choose AI search for their shopping journeys. ChatGPT maker OpenAI restructured to a for-profit business late last year, with experts predicting advertising revenue as an inevitable part of the platform’s near future.
Meanwhile, pay-to-play ads are an established part of rivals Google and Amazon’s business models. In late 2025, Amazon launched sponsored prompts within its AI assistant Rufus, where brands can bid on follow-up questions within consumers’ AI conversations as they shop. If, say, a customer is searching for a leather handbag, a brand can pay for the AI assistant to suggest its product and describe it according to the label’s own product description, in response to certain questions.
“The future of ads is already here with what Amazon has launched,” says AI search expert Max Sinclair. He predicts that in 2026, other AI platforms will follow in its footsteps with chat ads rather than traditional visual ads in sidebars. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has always been openly wary of balancing advertising with preserving consumer trust. A model like Amazon’s could be seen to be at odds with the personalised recommendations that the AI giant promoted with the release of its “shopping research” feature in late 2025. One thing we do know is that when the company does introduce ads in the near future, they’ll be what Altman has said he deems “thoughtful and tasteful.”
AI slop as a fashion marketing play
Consumers and creatives alike are wrestling with what ‘real’ means in an AI-enhanced world. In 2025, nowhere was this felt stronger than in creative campaigns. Where brands began to experiment with AI-generated images and video, they were mostly met with a social media backlash criticizing their work as “AI slop”. Across early experiments, the campaigns that drew the most criticism seemed to be the ones that were the most realistic, or leaned on archival imagery, where people argued the tech was unnecessary and made humans seem obsolete.
Cue a new trend where brands began to purposefully lean into the surreal as a way of approaching AI-generated imagery. Against a backdrop of rapid technological change and sociopolitical unrest, fashion brands’ marketing strategies were already leaning into the surreal to offer consumers a form of escapism. In 2026, creatives say we’ll see more brands leaning into the so-called “AI slop” aesthetic as a smart way to play on the tech’s entropic tendencies, leaning into an AI-generated aesthetic to gain attention and cut through saturated feeds.
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