Did Dior 'craft-wash' its holiday ad?

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0:39Hello and welcome back to the Glossy Podcast. I'm your host, senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi, and I'm here with our international reporter, Zofia Zviglinska. Hello, Zofia. How are you? Hi, Danny. We've got a fun one today and kind of festive. Fun and festive. We're talking about, well, we're talking about holiday fashion campaigns, but specifically we're talking about two things. I wrote a story last week about how a surprising number of fashion brands have holiday campaigns that are animated and called a lot of attention to the handcrafted, hand-drawn, or hand-posed elements of these campaigns.

1:18Levi's did a stop motion campaign where they showed a lot of behind the scenes of making the little models. Both Dior and Prada put out 2D animated films or short films, both of which they positioned as drawn by artists. And none of them explicitly said it, but I feel like the implication of all these campaigns was that it's not AI. This is made by humans. It's hand drawn. So we're going to talk about why brands are leaning that way. And then secondly, this came out sort of after I wrote my story. A lot of people started to question just how handmade some of these things were, particularly the Dior campaign.

1:54There has been a lot of analysis, people freeze-framing it and analyzing little details and noticing odd inconsistencies, including the dreaded six-finger hands. AI accusations started flying around. And so I think a very interesting part of this conversation will be brands positioning something as handmade and basically maybe not handmaking every bit of it the way they implied and the reaction from consumers. I think consumers are very hostile to generative AI and particularly in marketing and in creative fields. So we will talk about all of this stuff. But let's start with just why we think many brands recently have done these animated campaigns.

2:37And I think it goes beyond animation, too. I've seen plenty of recent campaigns, holiday or not, that have really heavily leaned into this was made by artists, by humans. Here's a behind the scenes, you know, footage of this artist putting this thing together meticulously. That seems to be a very common feature in a lot of fashion brand campaigns recently. How about you take the floor first, Sophia? Why do you think brands are going this way? And what do you think they're trying to say with some of these campaigns? yeah absolutely so obviously you know we we kind of saw I think last year that it was the the kind of year of of AI and everything was about technology and innovation kind of how everything was being pushed forward but I think coming into this year and I guess also like thinking about the the job market the economy like how many things are tied into this I think a lot of people got a bit spooked.

3:32And it's already been tough enough where I think a lot of the kind of nostalgia driving fashion trends is coming from a general malaise or kind of unease with the way that the world is right now. I think that that's extending now to the way that people see fashion brands. And obviously, so many of them are kind of data led and kind of sales led. I think there's a lot that has been lost around the kind of angle of humanity and kind of what makes us interesting as kind of creative humans. So I'm wondering if, you know, some of this has also got to do with just the change that people are seeing against, you know, the kind of ever-present rise of technology and surveillance and all of those things.

4:14And now it's more about craft and handmade stuff and things that have, you know, texture and interest. Like, I think Luervé probably started that with all of their different like intracarto bits and behind the scenes bits. But now it's kind of extended. Also, you know, it is Christmas and the holiday season. I think a lot of people just like having something cute and memorable and handmade and kind of, you know, cozy to get back to. I think a lot of these campaigns kind of build on that. I did an article, I think, last year around Strathbury doing it first with Felt with a local Ukrainian studio.

4:53And I think a lot of them have since thought, okay, well, this is a very good idea and something that maybe I respond to that maybe I don't respond to AI imagery quite the same way. No, I think you raise a bunch of good points there. I think for fashion brands, particularly luxury brands like Dior and Prada, there is an obvious reason why you would want to associate your brand with like a sort of meticulous, careful, and very intentional art form like animation. or another story I wrote recently about the hair care brand Orbet. They had worked with this French mosaicist and put a lot of emphasis in the campaign and in the footage of her meticulously mixing the mortar and placing the tiles one by one.

5:36And that was like a big part of it. And you can see why a brand would want to associate their like, the implication is that's how carefully we make your clothes or your shampoo or whatever it is. I think that's an obvious implication of those sorts of campaigns. And I think you're right also So the last couple of years has been a lot of top-down push of AI and a lot of bottom-up rejection of it. And I think there's some good examples recently outside of fashion too. Although a lot of luxury brands did generative AI heavy campaigns and got really bad reaction from their followers and from their audience.

6:09But also even things like, we were just talking before this recording, the new Leica stop-motion film Wildwood. People really love just how much work and care goes into making those stop-motion films. The Odyssey just broke every box office record, and Christopher Nolan is very vocal about doing everything practically, almost to a detriment, I would say. Sometimes in that movie, I was like, could have used a little CGI. But I feel like he makes a big deal about doing everything practically, and he certainly has spoken publicly about not wanting to use generative AI at all in his movies. And that got a fantastic reception.

6:47So even outside of fashion, I think from the bottom up, you know, people like to see real human art. The executives don't like to pay for real human art all the time, but the people certainly love to see it. So I think that's part of it. And then your last point about it being holidays, someone I talked to for my story was absolutely like holiday campaign is not the time to do the most like cutting edge futuristic thing. It's like people want like fireplaces and the snowy street and, you know, it's like definitely a good time for something more nostalgic. Coming from the land of John Lewis adverts, I completely get that.

7:24Like Christmas campaigns are an institution and should not be messed with. um I think it's it's also interesting and to be honest I read a great piece on the ever uh present platform called Substack from dot dot dot today talking a little bit about something called format debt and marketing and I think this actually falls a little bit towards marketing but also towards animation and we can talk about like the details of the Dior campaign and kind of how things went down and what animators said about it. But it basically places Dior's disputed animation alongside the expectations attached to things like the advent calendars.

8:02I know we talked a little bit about that. Basically arguing that borrowing a familiar format also means inheriting its audience's standards for that format. So basically thinking about comparing the animation process to haute couture. And then if a brand chooses to sell a film through a story about craftsmanship how it was made is basically part of of that advertising and that format debt is what a brand takes on as debt if they decide to replicate a particular format so for example replicating Prada's hand-drawn animation takes on the debt of you know creating that actual animation if you don't fulfill the debt audiences get disappointed um so I think that's a great point from Chris Morenzi and a nice way to kind of segue into the Dior conversation and everything that went down.

8:56Yeah, no, I think you're 100 % right that clearly the idea is to bank on the reputation of hand-drawn animation, which is known to be very time-consuming and difficult, but also very beautiful. And that's clearly the implication there. But then if you are taking shortcuts with that, it kind of like undercuts the whole premise.

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10:19So the Dior thing, and I'm going to get technical for a second, but I will really try to make this quick and easy. But they so they made this campaign called Night in Color. It was created with a wonderful French animator named Sylvain Chomay. He made an amazing movie called The Illusionist, which I really like. He's made several other movies, too. known for his traditional 2D hand-drawn animation style, which is even more notable because so much bigger budget animation has moved toward 3D animation because it's way cheaper and faster. 2D takes a lot longer. You basically have to draw every single frame.

10:54Typically it's 24, sometimes 12 frames per second. So even a six or I think it's six or seven minutes long, this short film, tens of thousands of frames. So it's a lot of work. and Sylvain Chomay has a great reputation as an artist who's committed to this art form. So the campaign came out. Personally, I thought it looked a little weird, but I kind of was like, that's fine. Mostly because I think there's some, it looked weirdly smooth, but I was like, they probably were doing a little bit of, like it's called rigging, where instead of redrawing a frame, you just kind of copy and paste and like rotate something, which is quicker, but is a little clunkier.

11:32It's not AI to do that, but that is something. But after the campaign came out, there started to be rumblings that there was maybe more shortcuts taken than was first immediately apparent. A lot of people started freeze-framing the campaign, looking very close, zooming in on the character's hands, or pausing when someone's moving and noticing pieces disappearing and reappearing. or there's a part where Christian Dior, who's a character in the short film, takes his hat off and he's got like a pom-pom on like his like pajama hat. And when he slides it off, like suddenly there's a second pom-pom on the other side.

12:09And some of those things, I was looking at it and I was like, if you paused any hand-drawn animation at random moments and look close, you'd probably see some weird stuff, even from like cartoons from the 1940s and later. That's just because like it's flashing by for 1 24th of a second, you're not, doesn't always need to be perfect. Also, there's something called a smear frame or multiples where like, if something's moving really fast and you pause it, you might see a character's arm is all exaggerated and weird looking, but when it's in motion, it looks totally normal. So that was my first thought.

12:44But as I was looking closer, it's like some of these things is a character's hands with like 11 fingers, but they're standing still. It's not like a smear frame. It's not in motion. It's a static image. And other, you know, kind of weird things like that. And these accusations sort of started to snowball to the point where Sylvain Chomay and the producer Anton Somache spoke to Variety and sort of defended their film. This is the part where I think it gets a little technical. And I'm sorry, I realize I'm already going way longer than I meant to. Sylvain Choumet said, we did everything traditional exactly the way they did in the 1940s.

13:19We did use some frame interpolation technology for some small parts. Frame interpolation is basically meaning you'd have two frames of animation or video, and the software creates a third frame in between them that kind of goes from one to the other. That technology has been around for a while and is not necessarily using generative AI the way we think of it. If you've ever seen like motion smoothing on a TV, that's frame interpolation. It's taking two frames and it's kind of just blending them together to make a third frame. So it's artificially increasing the amount of frames per second. Newer technologies are technically still the same thing, but are now actually using generative AI to like create a whole new image in between the frames.

14:01And it's sort of like that is how a lot of 2D animation is traditionally done, where you draw like the key frames, the most important poses and frames. And then usually someone else like a lower tier animator, like an intern or somebody does the in-betweens. They draw all those like little in-between frames. I think what they're saying here is that Sylvain Choumet and the other people who worked on it drew the key frames and then they let the technology do the in-betweens. And I think that they probably used one of the newer ones that is like fully generating those frames. And that's why it looks really weird.

14:37And I think in my opinion, that is misleading. Like that is a, that's different than we hand drew all of it. And it's different even then, and we use something to just blend some frames together. That's, I think that is misleading. So I'll stop my super technical explanation there. Zofia, do you think like, if that's the case, and again, that's, this is the one comment they've made and they did not go more into depth. And I believe you reached out to Dior and we haven't heard back. So we can't say much more than that. But just based on that, and if I'm correct in that, I think that's what they did.

15:10Like, would you say that that's misleading and implying something about the film that was not true? Absolutely. And I think the worst part is, is the fact that they were very prominent in terms of featuring the behind the scenes content as well. It wasn't just the film itself. The animator that I spoke to last year for the Strathbury piece, Hannah Shimizu, who's the managing partner at the creative agency and production studio, Hornet. She said that, you know, a lot of those things are missing from that BTS, which should be there. And for example, things like the, you know, measuring, for example, of frames between the main poses should have some more artistic judgment.

15:53So there should be anatomy, weight, timing, gesture, balance to kind of create a performance. And she said some of that was lacking, specifically that you can't simply assume that generating the frames also takes care of the creative decisions those frames might require. So again, need more background basically to see the whole film, or at least to see some unedited versions of it. And this is where, you know, Luxury's continued kind of glazing over some of these kind of handcrafted elements, maybe actually making a disservice. You know, she said that Dior showed little of the kind of construction of movement, which I think is a really important part of animation, because obviously that's how you create, you know, expression, kind of give things life without that.

16:38I think it would be very, very weird. She said, you know, one isolated drawing can show that a character was drawn, but it doesn't explain how the character was animated. And again, not the same thing was shown in the behind the scenes. I think that's the bit which is really lacking. Like if they were just to put out the film and basically said it's an artistic production and like, this is just basically what we're putting out, like there's nothing else to it. Like, I think maybe that could have been excused, but the behind the scenes content, the fact that, you know, Jonathan Anderson himself said that it was hand-drawn.

17:12Like, you're putting a lot of creative power. I believe he said entirely hand-drawn, right? Entirely hand-drawn, yeah. Like, the fact that you're putting that on the creative director to actually, like, back this, like, you have to make sure that those things are backed up because we are living, and again, this is something that Chris pointed out in the article around the kind of format debt, but social media makes it extremely easy for people to basically look through video clips, like point by point by point, and just essentially look at all of the little things that you might be missing. I mean, I don't know if anyone has seen the extreme level of analysis that like the GTA 5 trailer has, but like people will go through a lot of work just to see, you know, what has been missed, what has been shown, and comment on it on the internet and, you know, people pick up on that.

18:03Yeah. And I would certainly be like pretty terrified if someone was scrutinizing my work with that level of detail and thousands of people were doing it. Like you're probably going to find all sorts of errors and in any sort of creative work if you look that closely. But I think you're right. And the person you spoke to is correct that like the the in-between frames on a piece of animation or those like connecting bits that maybe don't seem that important is where a lot of the artist artistry is um show may said in this variety article it's a way of automating the repetitive mechanical part of animation not the creative work and i feel weird like disagreeing with this guy who's a legendary animator about the like fundamentals of animation but the in-between stuff is not repetitive and it is repetitive, but it's not not creative.

18:55And, you know, if you have a key frame of someone standing still and then you have the next key frame of them like having their hand up the way that the in-between frames is just them raising their hand. But the way they raise their hand says a lot. Do they do it like sharply and aggressively? Do they do it slowly and languorously? Like that's not not creative. And so I think it is definitely a shortcut that was taken. And in a campaign that the whole thing was like, this is drawn by hand, the traditional way, we're not taking any shortcuts, and then there were shortcuts taken. And I just think that is misleading.

19:30In our meeting, talking about this the other day, Zofia, you coined a wonderful term that I want everyone to start using, which is craft washing. Can you explain what you mean by craft washing? Because I just think that's a great word for this. Yeah, absolutely. So unfortunately, although I did think about it myself and did not like reference anything it turns out the craft washing is not a new term and something that was already coined by LSE so a university in London and basically they described it as misleading exaggerated or unsupported claims about artisanship heritage or benefits to makers which I think is particularly important here considering the state of you know animation in the wake of AI the amount of roles that are going how many people are actually employed, how tough the hours are.

20:18You know, when you're thinking of this applied to campaigns, you know, that basically raises that question of how accurately the advertised process. So again, not just the campaign, but the back, like behind the scenes as well, that's part of the campaign represents the actual production. So kudos to LSE, always getting in there first. But yes, craft washing is a really great term for this. And I think, you know, you've made some comparisons already to greenwashing and kind of how that was around in sustainability conversations that we've had. I think that's, it's basically a very similar way.

20:55You're putting the people and the effort second and you're putting basically like the value and the kind of shiny stuff first. I don't know. I think that it's a, it's a foul practice. It is. And just like greenwashing is about knowing that people want sustainability and wanting the credit for it without actually doing it. Craft washing is about knowing that people want, you know, intentionally made human art and wanting the credit for it without actually doing it. And I know that sounds a little harsh. Again, I don't think anyone, including neither of us, is saying that this Dior campaign was 100 percent.

21:33Like, it's clearly Sylvain Choumet's style. Clearly, there was they do have some behind the scenes footage of drawings and sketches and concept art and even models made of the characters. So there is human involvement. I just think it's entirely handmade is misleading. We should talk for a second about how, because of craft washing, something I'm noticing in a lot of campaigns is the intense focus on behind the scenes of footage of how something is made. Levi's for their stop motion campaign, and I did talk to Levi's about this. They said it took them and a UK-based studio that they worked with 2 ,000 hours to make this like two minute short film.

22:12Like stop motion is very infamously time consuming, but they posted a lot of footage of how they sketched and designed the characters, how they built the physical models, how they posed them meticulously. Like it almost felt, and I understand why they do it since this is what we're talking about. It's almost like trying to preemptively diffuse any possible accusation of AI by like making it super clear with tons of evidence like that this was made by hand and took as long as we're saying it took. The Prada ad, I think, had similar things. They worked with a legendary Disney animator, John Pomeroy.

22:50There's a lot of footage that they have put out of him, his hand, drawing with pencil or drawing on a tablet, like storyboards and concept art and footage of the actual creation of it. And I just think it makes sense that brands, if they're going to go this way and they're going to do something and they're going to market it that way, to feel the need to almost prove it preemptively before, you know, try to get ahead of any potential accusations of AI. Like, do you think that's it? Yeah, I think that is exactly it. Like, you have to make sure that you're showing the work. And again, this kind of goes back to the format there.

23:26But if you don't show the full behind-the-scenes process, you're essentially ridding the people or stealing from their, like, effort idea or debt idea of what the brand is doing. And I think that, you know, as brands have become more transparent around their campaigns, or at least more interested in showing some of that effort that goes into the campaign, because they know that it can be so easily like AI generated. Like maybe that's also part of, you know, the actual kind of marketing 360, you know, that we constantly have to talk to marketers about like that is the whole process evolving and kind of getting even bigger.

24:06now it's not just about the campaign and the film imagery and the like stop imagery for the for the site like it's also about all of those extra bits the interviews with actors like that was something that Dior did I think they showed some of the recordings that they did with Robert Patterson and some of the others around how the doc how the campaign was made and I think it's it's kind of the same like if you're only showing parts of it you're essentially like hiding or maybe potentially like even lying about something that you're doing. What's interesting with the dual one is that with, I think, some of the criticism that it got, especially on platforms like LinkedIn, where animators were very keen to kind of talk about their experience with it.

24:53In particular, animation studio co-founder Ben Wilde said that two people who said that they worked on the film basically also had said that there was extensive AI use, not just a little bit. and the making of bit was completely staged. So again, talking about how quickly does a campaign go to market? How quickly is the production even done? And is it the fact that maybe Prada showed this and you all got wind and they decided to rush together a production? I don't know how quickly that would be made. I would assume it would take a good couple of months to come together with such an idea. But considering the pace of acceleration that I think a lot of marketing departments are having to work with now, I'm wondering if that's also part of it.

25:44Like I know that, for example, with the Strathbury one, it took them like a year to come up with the whole campaign with all the back behind the scenes content, like with actually doing all of the felted characters. Like it takes a long time to put these things together. If you like attempt to kind of rush the process, it's really, really bad. Yeah. And I mean, again, that's both the positive of why brands want to associate with these art forms and the downside is like they famously take a really long time and take a lot of work. I don't know, Zofia, if you've ever seen the TV show Parks and Recreation, but there's a very funny scene, which I reference in my story, where the character played by Adam Scott gets really into stop motion.

26:28And he spends like two or three weeks making this short film. And then he goes to show another character like his progress and he plays it. And it's like two seconds of a character like standing up out of bed and that's it. And he's like, this took me weeks to make. But that is sort of how stop motion goes. One other thing I want to talk about, and then we can maybe wrap up in a second here, is I'm certainly not on the side of the craft washers here. And I'm certainly on the side of like wanting, wanting to see more beautiful handmade art by humans, etc. I do think that people really dislike AI so much that I do think there is some false positives going around.

27:12Because after the Dior thing, then I started seeing people say, actually, maybe the Prada ad is the Prada campaign is AI too. And people started digging into that. That one, I think, is more like I didn't see I haven't seen any screenshots or anything that convinced me that there was AI involved there. But people have started to say I've seen a few posts on various animation subreddits or on Instagram. And outside of fashion, there have been people have lost book deals because of the possibility that the book they wrote involved AI. Like there's so much vigilance around it that I do think it's possible that people might get swept up who maybe didn't use AI at all just at the possibility.

27:53And I think that's why, like we were saying, there is a lot of effort to preemptively show your work. And like you said, talk to the actors and talk to the animators and put as much footage out there as possible just to avoid this. And I do think it's unfortunate if someone has not used AI and just they are bad at drawing hands and people take that as I'm terrible at drawing hands. Probably a lot of people would think my hands are AI, but it's just that I'm not a good artist. So I don't know. I just think that's a potential risk here, too. Yeah. And I think that, you know, what we saw earlier this year with the Ghibli kind of style coming out through ChatGPT, like that was, you know, obviously something which borrowed on that style and definitely should have had, you know, creative licenses and shouldn't have been so easy to replicate.

28:44Okay, I think the problem is that as these AI platforms get better at replicating imagery, video, like all of it, I think it just makes for a much tougher call for someone to be able to distinguish what is and what isn't. And that's what we need people in the industry for who are there, you know, fewer and fewer. I think that there's a post-production company called Absolute Animation on Blind Pig. They closed in May. Envy, Pixar, like they've all had cuts this year to those animation departments. And I think that that makes it a lot more difficult to tell if something is done well, for example, if there aren't any experts in the space who are able to say so.

29:26And, you know, I think it's something that we're going to need more and more. You know, I spoke to creative director Juliana Salazar who worked with Romoa on their stop motion campaign. And she said, you can't cut corners. You can't underappreciate or undervalue talent or the time or dedication it requires. And to incorporate it successfully, craft, you have to commit to going against the current of our time being, you know, AI led. It's the ultimate rejection of what modern business and society says you should be doing, which I think is a kind of great point and something to kind of end on where there's so many, like, creative, amazing fields that are involved with fashion, have been involved with fashion for a very, very long time.

30:09and just because you know new technologies come into the space I don't think therefore we should be cutting those out too I think that you know I don't know if we talked about it on the previous podcast but there have been you know a lot of calls to make AI generated imagery have like a stamp on it so that you know that it is AI generated and I think it has these platforms get better that's going to be even bigger of a concern and potentially like maybe will see Christmas campaigns next year with a stamp saying AI free or AI imagery free. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree. I think we should end there, but I will just say I agree with you.

30:49I know people who work in the animation industry and it sounds pretty brutal in terms of job prospects at the moment, which is a shame because it's a beautiful art form. Yeah, I think the accusations, the usage of AI and then accusations of usage of AI often I think it's funny when someone's like I ran your text through this equally unreliable AI detection thing and it told me it was AI and I'm like you're both just like throwing stuff around you don't know what you're saying um it's weird it's a weird time um definitely I think we'll probably see more we'll probably see more fashion campaigns using AI and getting backlash and more fashion campaigns saying they're not using AI and being accused of using it anyway I think all of This is going to keep happening for the foreseeable future.

31:36But let's wrap it up there. Zofia, thank you for being here and sharing your thoughts. Thank you so much. So fun. And thank you all for listening. And we'll see you here next week.

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