The fashion and beauty marketing function is in flux. In 2025, both industries face a number of challenges — from increasing customer acquisition costs to competing for attention across saturated channels. Although inflation has waned, consumers have a diminished appetite for discretionary spending amid today’s turbulent global economy. This market reality requires brands to make…
Two new papers in Science Robotics, published on August 27 by UC Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg, argue that truly capable humanoid robots remain far further off than the most optimistic timelines suggest. While large language models (LLMs) surged into everyday use by training on vast internet text, Goldberg says robots can’t ride the same data…
When Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek debuted a chatbot that it said rivaled the best the United States had to offer, and at a fraction of the cost, venture capitalist Marc Andreesen called it “AI’s Sputnik moment.” Seven months later, it appears DeepSeek needs some American rocket power to get its AI Sputnik off the…
“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs. For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could…
In fairness, the U.K. government did demand Apple grant it a backdoor to access user data, teeing up an almighty fight with the U.S. And its online safety laws have tried to rein in tech giants with new rules forcing them to police “harmful” content – much to the annoyance of some U.S. lawmakers. Still,…
Fast-food chains are still ringing up sales, but the diners they serve look different from a year ago. McDonald’s said this week that profit for the spring quarter rose 11% to $2.25 billion, helped by a 3.8% gain in worldwide same-store sales. But growth at U.S. outlets slowed to 2.5%. Executives pointed to “continued pressure”…
Virtual model wearing different three different outfits promoting three different skincare products. ChatGPT Fashion modeling faces significant technological disruption as AI platforms expand beyond basic model generation into comprehensive content creation systems. Precedence Research projects the AI fashion market will reach $60 billion by 2034, with annual growth rates of nearly 40%. The transformation happening…
When I first started writing The Business of Fashion in 2007 as a blog and occasional newsletter, it was simply a place for me to explore an industry that had always fascinated me. At the time, blogs and newsletters like mine were completely new to the fashion industry. At 6am London time, mine was the…
Out of the fashion leaders polled in the 2025 BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion Executive Survey, “uncertainty” was the most common sentiment. Just 20 percent of respondents expected market conditions from 2024 to improve, while 41 percent expected conditions to remain the same and 39 percent expected them to worsen. Consumer confidence and appetite to spend…
Seventeen councils are accommodating up to 10 times more asylum seekers than homeless people, analysis suggests. The biggest disparity was seemingly in Pendle, a borough inside Reform’s newly-gained Lancashire authority. Latest Government data shows 453 asylum seekers are being housed in Pendle. In contrast, only nine homeless households are in temporary accommodation. Critics of Britain’s…