Latest / The Interline Podcast / Substack, Politics, Surveillance, Scaling Recycling, And Labelling AI
Transcript
- Grace: Welcome to the edit from the Interline, the show where we run a quick fire analysis on our pick of the most important fashion and beauty technology stories from the last seven days. I'm Grace the Social Editor and I'm joined by Ben, the editor in chief, and together we have less than twenty five minutes to give our analysis on the stories that we think really matter. Ben: Hey Grace. Good to see you again. Good to be doing this again. Let's roll. Grace: The first story is about Substack. Specifically, Substack have announced the next stage of their native sponsorship program. And this is really relevant for us because Balenciaga, the fashion brand, is one of the founding flagship partners. And this is along with other tech companies, including Granola, Uber, and Polymarket. Personally, as a creator myself, I've been kind of back and forth on whether I should be on Substack or not. But fundamentally I have landed on that I should be on Substack and I think it's a really positive platform. I know that the Interline has chosen not to be on Substack, so I wanted to get your take on this story. And I also wanted to hear what you think about like fashion and Substack generally. Ben: Okay, so you're yeah, you're correct. The the interline is not on Substack. ⁓ some of that is laziness, some of it is we simply haven't got around to it. big bit of it is ⁓ firm believers, or I'm a firm believer at least, in owning our own distribution. ⁓ we are a website. I'm old enough to be a website guy. Like when when ⁓ maybe not we started the interline, but when I started doing this in general, ⁓ a website was you created. Because it was a thing you owned, it was a medium you could build, and it was a relationship with your audience that you could have directly. be a lot of brands who come from the same era. There'll be a lot of fashion brands who come from the pre-platform era, ⁓ come from the world where ⁓ was the start of e-commerce. If you want to be on the web, you have to do it yourself. You have to own it yourself. I think that mindset carries through for a lot of companies. There are a lot of companies who see ⁓ their website their owned channels as the primary method of reaching the consumer. Then you Have more in the way of younger companies, digital savvy companies who see platforms as a way of reaching the consumer. And then you have another cohort of people who see the creators on those platforms as a way of reaching their consumers. You've kind of gone through three degrees of separation there. the behind it seems to ⁓ that if you're a creator on YouTube, Instagram or, you know, com TikTok comparable platforms. You are reliant on advertising and reliant on brand. Right? That's that's how those platforms work. You don't get paid enough, anywhere near enough directly by YouTube or Instagram to go and create videos and create content. You sign brand deals, you build partnerships and things. Now Substack are offering to take over a lot of the infrastructure, the bookings, the ⁓ the admin overhead, like everything that's involved in finding those, as well as pairing great advertisers in the form of Valencia Agar and so on with potentially great creators. The key bit to it that isn't directly enumerated in there, but is in the way that Substack has talked about algorithms and feeds before, is that as a brand, if you want to work with an influencer, you want to work with a creator, great, you can forge that relationship. That creator's relationship with their eventual audience, which is the audience and the demographic you're paying to try and reach, is then mediated by two entities. It's mediated by the platform owner, your YouTube or your Instagram or so on. And it's mediated by an opaque algorithm that gets in the way. now the promise of Substack is that engage the creator, the creator has a direct relationship with their audience, and it gives you a much shorter and more authentic route to that. ⁓ if I was gonna kind of straw man this, I would say that ⁓ to me looks an awful lot like a platform in a different coat. ⁓ it it looks an awful lot like any of the others. It has a different engagement metric, it has a different, more permissive kind of structure. It allows people to own their audience, own more of their revenue, ⁓ and so on. ⁓ so there's there's a part of me that feels like this is a lateral step more than anything else for these kinds of companies. ⁓ But I a lot of creators on Substack. I see a lot of brands on Substack. ⁓ and from a technology point of view, ⁓ it seem as though it's ⁓ poised become ⁓ one ⁓ the kind of big Tell us of the way that brands and consumers engage. So it's an interesting one for sure. Grace: The next story is entering a space that we don't usually talk about and it's politics. So even our international listeners will probably know that we're about to get our like seventh prime minister in the last decade. And I think I was something like sixteen or seventeen when we had our last prime minister serve full term, which is so crazy. There's been a lot of upheaval in politics everywhere, but with the current mess that's going on in the UK, it is particularly interesting for our listeners. And it's tied to this north south divide that we do have in the UK, because this is also really interestingly linked to the textile trade. So we're not about to make this a politics show, but I wanted to get your take and kind of get you to give everyone a bit of an update on what's going on and whether you think it has implications for fashion and also fashion technology. Ben: Yeah, it's a it's a good question. And I also avoid talking about politics almost always in polite society and ⁓ and at work. ⁓ it's doubly interesting, so for e for listeners outside the UK, you might not be able to tell mine and Grace's accents apart, but Grace's Grace is in London and I'm in Manchester. ⁓ and the latest revolving door of prime ministers is interesting because the the guy who's about to ⁓ step in as as our next prime minister has been the mayor of Manchester ⁓ for the last decade or so. Manchester's the city I live in, ⁓ has gone through a massive regeneration. ⁓ I think it's one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. ⁓ has quickly become like a seat for a lot of media, and a huge amount of tech as well. the guy who's ⁓ poised to step in, Andy Burnham, is a big for what we refer to here as like devolution, which is a lot of the decision making, a lot of the ⁓ value creation, a lot of everything in the UK is centralized in London, the same way that it is in Paris, in France, the same way that it is in Milan and Italy and s and so on. he's a big advocate for the fact that that shouldn't necessarily be the case. Your capital is your capital for a reason, but there's a lot of industry that potentially could, should diversify across the country to ⁓ to spread wealth and to take advantage of opportunity. Grace mentioned the textile trade. ⁓ ⁓ Along with Liverpool, Leeds, Leicester, a lot of of bigger cities in the north of the of the country ⁓ were the seat of traditional textile trade. So Manchester's ⁓ complete and very complicated legacy is built on the the slave trade and the and the cotton trade. There's an interesting ⁓ digression and dissection of that. If you want to listen to my previous interview I did with Gemma Grattan, who is the director of Manchester Fashion Week, we engage with Manchester's kind of complicated legacy there. But the upshot of it is that While Andy Burnham hasn't directly talked about domestic manufacturing from a textiles point of view, he has talked about manufacturing and ⁓ across other industries, kind of ⁓ heavy machinery industry and so on. ⁓ I don't think textile manufacturing is necessarily far behind. ⁓ interesting part for me is if you read this year's AI report, which is due out very soon, ⁓ a tech company in there as one of our top flight sponsors who are from Manchester. They're a tech tech startup doing some fascinating stuff in 3D and AI, and they are from Manchester. ⁓ I think what our UK listeners and international listeners will see a whole bunch more of in the the UK in the kind of months and years to come is this kind of repositioning of where brands live, where technology, kind of what the seat of technology is, where the seat of manufacturing things is. It's a very interesting time for the UK. It's a very interesting time for me, someone who's lived in Manchester for most of my life. I think it does potentially have some implications for not just fashion, not just where fashion manufacturing happens, but where fashion technology gets made as well. ⁓ Grace: Our next story has some kind of weird parallels to the ones we've just spoken about, because no matter who's in power, we still live in one of the most surveilled countries in the world. And with the rise of AI and different things, I'm seeing a lot of people get more and more concerned about data protection. And I also saw a really timely article in Vogue this week about anti-surveillance garments, which is really interesting. I also think that this is kind of tied to the conversation that we had last week about AI glasses. So I wanted to get your take on all of this. Ben: Yeah, one of the UK's best exports and like mass mass surveillance along with colonialism. we've got a good track record. ⁓ yeah, so we're not the most surveilled state in the world. You and I had to look this up ⁓ in advance of recording. We're something like the fifth. We're behind China, we're behind the US. ⁓ but ⁓ are emblematic, I think, of a wider kind of ⁓ push towards ⁓ ubiquitous ⁓ whenever leave the house. When you and I talked about this before the show, you're younger than me, as is well documented across this. I think you see this as maybe less of a problem than than I do. And part of me wonders if that's because you've grown up with just being the background noise and the status quo, is that whenever you leave your house, you are recorded. ⁓ Now That is gonna get kicked into a higher gear if AI enabled or at the very least like camera integrated glasses takeoff ⁓ as a category. It's not clear at this point that that's necessarily going to happen, but it seems like it's it's what big technology is pushing towards. Now if you pair with ⁓ I believe the company's called ClearVision with or ClearView, whichever company is that does the mass facial recognition for ⁓ for the police state in the in the UK and and abroad, ⁓ you have a big apparatus for recording Recording people. ⁓ And you're see some to that kind of like the early days of Google Glass, that glass holes thing where people don't like being recorded all the time wherever they are. I think fashion does have a play here. That Vogue article that you mentioned is is really interesting because you can integrate surveillance blocking into things that you would wear anyway. ⁓ I remember we did a piece on it years and years and years ago, which was, ⁓ I it was like a hoodie, ⁓ and you you pulled it up and it also had like a zip-up face thing with ⁓ what looks an awful lot like urban camouflage or a QR code on it, which was designed to obfuscate facial detection. ⁓ it doesn't need to be that complicated, it can be literally a case of high. Hiding your face or or having like reflective garments and things that block IR sensors ⁓ I don't think we've seen the end of this, is is the bottom line. I think the more cameras you put out there on people's faces everywhere else, ⁓ the more people ⁓ to translate this against ⁓ AI in general into animus against ⁓ wanting. ⁓ AI to be able to know where they are at all times and plugging AI into the surveillance apparatus that we already have, the more you'll start to see people take ⁓ against it. ⁓ when I was younger, I was probably more a privacy advocate. As I've got older, I've become more of I g I give up and I'm just gonna have to use Chrome because that's ⁓ it's a requirement to participate in the world. ⁓ I think you might see older people like me more sliding into that, and then you maybe see young people ⁓ a bit more activist. I don't know, this is this is a complicated space, but I do think there's something for fashion to do here. ⁓ we talked last week about kind of integrating heat tech and things into garments. I think starting to integrate some of this ⁓ identity protection tech into garments is gonna become a big thing as well. ⁓ Grace: The next story is a bit of a change of pace. I read a piece from Sourcing Journal about Genealogia. So the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textile and Apparel partnered with Genealogia, who are from Spain, and also Loopworks, which is a US textile to textile recycling company, and they've created this new thing called Green Machine Circular Textile Ecosystems, which is basically a way for them to separate different blended fabrics which have cotton and polyester in them. To me this feels like a really big leap forward for sustainable fashion and circular fashion. So I wanted to get your take on it. Yeah. Ben: I'm gonna try and strike a balance here between raining on people's parade and and not. so ⁓ do the raining a bit first. ⁓ innovation does not have a great history of ⁓ successful shall we say. I've done two podcasts episodes on this actually in the in the recent past. One is already out with ⁓ Stephen Bates, who's the CEO of ⁓ of Rheon Labs, which is ⁓ energy control ingredient technology company, talking about ⁓ how difficult. kind of in innovation in materials and process and ⁓ and production can be. And I have another one that I'm recording early next week with ⁓ with somebody else, which is about very same thing. Like it's there's a difference between proving something out at the research and the pilot and the and the early stage and then actually making it work at commercial scale. Now everyone's familiar with the big like kind of renew cell, the other the sort of big stories about recycling innovations that did not take off, that didn't make the full kind of, they didn't make the leap from this is a nice idea and we support it as a brand, to we are willing to ⁓ invest significant amounts in this and start to make it a bigger part of how we work. Now, some of that comes down to where you put it. So ⁓ if you're trying to do like pre-consumer recycling, then obviously this machinery and this ecosystem needs to exist in the supply chain, close to where that pre-consumer waste is generated. ⁓ in factories, ⁓ and and so on as ⁓ as offcuts of the cutting process. If it's post consumer, if it's a case of you and me going into a store and returning or donating mm blended sh polyester cotton garments and having that then mechanically separated into its constituent fibers, ⁓ that machinery needs to exist somewhere roughly proximate to where we live. ⁓ If a case of then just shipping it around across to the other side of the world, a lot of the the value of doing it, a lot of the incentive of doing it erodes. ⁓ All that being said, ⁓ I'll stop raining on the parade because it is very true ⁓ that monomaterials, like pure cotton, ⁓ are it much, much easier to recycle than blends. and it's also true that the fashion industry and consumers in general have a bit of an obsession with putting polyester or ⁓ you know, oil-derived synthetics into garments because people like stuff that has a little bit of stretch to it. and that means that a lot of what we wear ⁓ is not like eminently recyclable. so if you're able to take something like this and do what I believe is I know if it's mechanical separation or chemical separation, I will refresh my understanding and we'll come back to that in a future week. ⁓ if we're able to do this, it potentially is a leap in ⁓ in the direction, but it needs a lot of industry buy in, the same way that these things also do. ⁓ so I think people are right to be enthusiastic and the evidence is also there to give people a right to be skeptical about how it plays out. Fingers crossed, time will tell. Grace: Finally, the labelling of recycled materials has also been in the headlines this week. So a few brands like Adidas, Calvin Klein, and Uniqlo have had their ads investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority, so the ASA, and they've determined that their use of the word recycled in their ads would lead consumers to believe that their whole collections and products were made entirely from recycled materials, which they actually weren't. At the same time, we're also seeing more regular regulation rollout around labelling AI generated imagery. So this is a very different space, but it does feel like it's part of the same challenge, which is that companies need to be able to back up the provenance of the things they're putting out into the world and also through their advertising. So do you think that these are short term blips or is something bigger going on here? Ben: So I think the the recycle one is part of the broader kind of anti greenwashing side of things. I don't I don't think it's especially novel. I think it's the first time that the ASA has directly gone after the definition of what constitutes recycled. ⁓ Now This seems like an easy thing to fix. ⁓ I'm not I'm not surprised that this would be pulled up if these companies were saying this is a recycled product. It would it depends very much on the framing of the ads. It seems like an easy fix. ⁓ what you have to do is you have to say this product is made up of majority recycled materials. This product is made up of minority recycled materials. If it in the case of footwear, which I know is the subject of one of these things, ⁓ you could say something like the the upper is made of recycled ⁓ PET, the the none of the rest of it is. The rest of it is traditional ⁓ in injection molded, the rest of it's traditional pl plastics and adhesives and everything else. So I I don't think that's a huge one to fix or a huge one to ⁓ to fixate on. It is, you're right, like it is emblematic of the fact that what you put out and what you say as a brand is something that you have to be able to substantiate. This is what the ASA have said in their response: is that They asked these companies to provide evidence of the the the amount of recycled materials that were in there. And the companies were not generally able to give that to a satisfactory level ⁓ and d requires more granularity in there. that's always been true for this like declaring the sustainability profile of a garment. It's very true for digital product passports, for instance. ⁓ are able to put ⁓ whatever you want in a DPP, whether you can stand by it is ⁓ is a different matter. ⁓ And standing by something like recycled, standing by something like regenerative cotton, standing by something like waterless dying or whatever, if we're talking about denim, is something that you have to be able to walk back to your suppliers. You have to be able to say, This happened at this stage, this happened here, I have the data to prove it. ⁓ the AI labeling one is the same thing, because if you're gonna put an image out in an ad that has ⁓ either a generative component to it or that was completely generated. ⁓ as a brand to ⁓ accountability to that ⁓ the here and now, even if the regulation is not clear. ⁓ it's not sufficient for any purpose at this point to just be images, using AI to edit images ⁓ and not having an audit trail to be able to say, well, this was what we generated. This was what was physical photography that we augmented. Just looking back at your workspace and going, look at this node, look at the node that follows, look at the node that follows, and you could see what we generated so that we actually have the data governance and the structure to be able to disclose this stuff. ⁓ AI labeling stuff is a little bit more complicated because the New York legislation that people are ⁓ talking about a at the moment concerns ⁓ quote unquote like synthetic performers ⁓ that's specific to ⁓ to New York State. Now ⁓ that's very explicit its wording And it would 100% cover if you were a fashion brand and you want to use a generated human-looking model to model your clothes, that that would be a synthetic performer. ⁓ and there is no there's no ambiguity in the wording, there's no way of getting around the fact that that's something that you then have to label. Now the EU one, which ⁓ is coming into force in August, I believe, is is a little bit more complicated. So there are ⁓ They're providing a list of labels for people to use, ⁓ like little icons that you put on things. But the wording is is ambiguous. It's got some wiggle room to it. so you cannot put fully AI-generated text on a product detail page ⁓ a disclosure label, unless ⁓ text is reviewed by a person and that person is then accountable. So that again feels like that, that feels like a very easy fix. ⁓ you can just say, well, ⁓ I now designate my marketing team or my e-commerce team ⁓ with responsibility to do that. And I no longer have to label this text as AI generated. image part of it is focused on it, uses the deepfake language a lot. Now, deep fakes means something different to me. Deepfakes means ⁓ the more traditional technique of taking ⁓ an who's portraying somebody ⁓ and having them do somebody do an impersonation and then using a machine learning model to ⁓ train on ⁓ lots of their the the actual actor ⁓ kind of ⁓ previous films and things and having them stand in for it. ⁓ so that's that's what that means to me. Now it means something different to to other people, but The way that it's written does not explicitly, at least the way I read it, it does not explicitly require brands using human looking generated models to disclose that fact, as far as I can tell. don't use me as a as a justification for this, and I do not run a brand. ⁓ But if you look at the specific of the EU Act when it comes to labeling images, ⁓ I feel like wholly generated AI models actually ⁓ permissible. the way that it's written. Perhaps I'm wrong, ⁓ and people ⁓ should read upcoming report 'cause there's a lot about this in there. ⁓ and I would like to bring somebody on my interview show to talk about this very soon as well. Grace: Amazing. Ben: Well, that's our stories for the week. Grace, ⁓ thanks as always for doing this with me. ⁓ looking forward to next week.