Vogue's robot runway stunt draws backlash ahead of a Silicon Valley pivot

Vogue World, the magazine’s annual traveling runway spectacle now in its fifth year, closed its Milan edition this week with a segment called “The Age of Intelligence,” in which humanoid robots made by the Chinese firm Unitree walked through the Galleria to Gigi D’Agostino’s “L’Amour Toujours,” waved their arms for applause, and one performed a lasso trick — all without clothes on. The pained expression of Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele went viral, and the robots, not the actual fashion on display, became the story out of Milan. The same Unitree robots have separately made headlines worldwide for their dance routines and for falling and breaking, and similar units also appeared on the runway at London Fashion Week, which is underway now.

The Milan show had been marketed as a tribute to Italian craftsmanship and “the human touch” in an age of technology, making the robot segment an odd fit. It was also sponsored in part by Meta Glasses, with additional support from OpenAI — ties that reflect editor Anna Wintour’s deepening alignment with tech’s biggest moguls. Vogue World’s next edition moves to San Francisco next year, a city the event has not previously visited.

Reaction to the Milan stunt was largely negative, with critics pointing to the optics of celebrities cheering on robots amid a cost-of-living crisis and concerns about AI, surveillance, and job displacement. Jason Johnson, founder of Culture Impact Agency, said the pairing of fashion and tech money was not new — Vogue has courted Silicon Valley for at least a decade — and framed the trade plainly: “Vogue has the cultural influence and access that those tech people want.”

Not everyone saw the robots as representative of where fashion-tech collaboration is actually headed. Muna Ikedionwu, founder of the startup strategy firm MKEDI, pointed instead to work like the artist duo AA Murakami’s bubble dress for Olympian Eileen Gu at this year’s Met Gala as a better example of engineering and AI shaping fashion and design.

Why it matters

Vogue’s push into tech-sponsored spectacle shows how legacy media brands are trading cultural cachet for tech-industry money and audience reach — a trade that risks overshadowing the fashion itself, as the Milan robot backlash demonstrated.