Gucci's Direction, Luxury Market Metrics, and AI's Role in Fashion

Earned media value and similar vanity metrics don’t predict commercial success—what actually matters is long-term brand health and revenue, as shown by Chanel’s 16% growth despite lower social media buzz.

Summary of Ask Imran Anything: Vanity Metrics, Creativity and Commerce, Gucci’s Future. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:04:06 — Gucci represents a disproportionate share of revenue and profit for parent company Kering, so the brand’s recent sales contractions directly threaten the entire corporation’s performance.
• 00:04:57 — The most recent Gucci collection in Milan showed the clearest vision yet from creative director Demna, with preppy and bourgeois looks that were easy to understand compared to previous confusing directions.
• 00:06:02 — Despite better clarity, questions remain about whether Demna’s collections create the emotional connection and perceived value that today’s discerning luxury customers demand in a flat market.
• 00:07:05 — The balance between creative expression and commercial viability depends on having an explicit strategy that the entire organization understands and commits to, not conflict between designers and business teams.
• 00:09:27 — Mathieu Blanchet’s success at Chanel works because leadership across design, merchandising, and marketing all operate with the same strategic vision, creating dialogue rather than friction.
• 00:11:11 — Earned media value and similar metrics are vanity measurements designed to help marketing teams justify budgets to finance departments by converting attention into dollar figures.
• 00:12:51 — Top-performing luxury brands like Chanel don’t necessarily rank highest in earned media value metrics, proving these measurements don’t correlate with actual commercial performance.
• 00:16:29 — AI cannot generate beautiful campaigns and strategies independently; human judgment, taste, and experience remain fundamentally necessary to direct and refine AI-generated options.
• 00:18:30 — Building human taste through real experiences like museums, physical magazines, and cultural immersion becomes increasingly valuable as AI tools proliferate in creative industries.

In depth

Why Gucci’s clarity problem is a Kering problem

Four separate listeners asked about Gucci, which Ahmed says is no accident: it’s one of the most frequent questions he fields from people inside the industry. The stakes explain the obsession. Gucci isn’t just one brand among several in the Kering portfolio, it generates a disproportionate share of the group’s revenue and profit 00:04:06, which means the parent company’s fortunes rise and fall largely on whether Gucci is working. And by Ahmed’s account, it hasn’t been working for a while: sales have kept contracting even after Demna was installed as creative director and his collections began hitting stores 00:04:25.

Ahmed’s read on the most recent Milan show is more generous than the listener’s framing, which described Gucci’s recent output as a confusing “papery” of theater shows, Times Square spectacles, and archive reissues. He agrees the brand had been sending mixed signals, pointing to the disjointed run from the theatrical La Familia show to the body-conscious Primavera collection to the Gucci Cosmos event in New York 00:05:14. Against that backdrop, he considers the latest show in Milan the sharpest and most legible Demna has produced for the house, built around preppy, bourgeois menswear and womenswear worn by recognizable women of stature like Amanda Harlick and Sabine Getty 00:05:0600:05:43. For Ahmed, legibility itself is progress.

But legibility isn’t the same as resolution, and he’s careful not to oversell the show as a turnaround. The deeper question he leaves open is whether a clearer silhouette is enough in a luxury market that isn’t growing and where customers have become pickier about both design innovation and the emotional payoff of what they buy 00:06:02. He says plainly that he hasn’t yet felt that emotional connection from Demna’s work, even as he credits the clarity. That tension, a brand finally speaking in one voice but still unproven on whether anyone wants to listen, is the unresolved strategic question he says Kering’s CEO Luca de Meo and his executives are wrestling with daily 00:06:30.

Creativity versus commerce: the real variable is alignment, not conflict

A fashion student’s question about brand management “restraining” design toward commercial ends gives Ahmed a chance to reframe the whole debate. He rejects the premise that creativity and commerce are inherently opposed forces where one side wins at the other’s expense. Instead he argues the real variable is whether a brand’s leadership has made an explicit, shared decision about where on the creativity-commerce spectrum it wants to sit 00:07:58. A runway built around wearable, salable clothes isn’t automatically a compromise; a runway built around pure creative expression isn’t automatically braver or better. Both can be correct, depending on the strategy a given house has actually committed to.

He uses Balenciaga as the cautionary case. Pierre Paolo Piccioli is, in Ahmed’s words, one of the most talented designers working today, but Ahmed says he genuinely doesn’t understand the brief Piccioli was given: somehow honor Cristóbal Balenciaga’s historic heritage while also retaining the very different customer base Demna built during his tenure there 00:08:2900:08:37. Ahmed flags that these two mandates may simply be incompatible, and that no amount of individual design talent can paper over a brand that hasn’t resolved what it’s actually trying to be. He draws a direct line to a recent conversation he had with Marc Jacobs, with the same conclusion: swapping in a new creative director is never sufficient on its own if the surrounding business strategy isn’t equally overhauled 00:08:52.

Chanel is the counter-example, and the reasoning matters more than the result. Ahmed’s claim isn’t simply that Mathieu Blazy is talented, it’s that his success is structural: president of fashion Bruno Pavlovsky, CEO Leena Nair, Blazy himself, and the marketing and merchandising teams are all operating from the same strategic script 00:09:3300:09:40. He describes an ongoing dialogue between Blazy and the merchandising teams, where disagreement can exist without becoming organizational friction, because everyone is rowing toward the same definition of what Chanel is for 00:10:0700:10:18. Chanel’s growth, up 16% in the first half of 2026 against a flat luxury market, becomes for Ahmed the proof that this kind of alignment, not individual genius alone, is what produces results that look like magic from the outside 00:12:51.

The vanity-metric problem in influencer and ambassador strategy

Asked whether metrics like earned media value, media impact value, and similar figures mean anything, Ahmed doesn’t hedge: he calls them vanity numbers, developed essentially so marketing teams have a dollar figure to hand finance teams when requesting budget 00:11:1100:11:22. The detail he keeps returning to is the currency itself. These scores get expressed in dollars, but nobody can clearly explain the methodology that converts social chatter into a specific dollar value, which should be the first red flag that the number is doing a rhetorical job rather than a measurement job 00:11:3200:11:39.

His sharpest example is the pattern of brands flying in Thai celebrities with hyper-engaged fandoms to front rows during fashion week, after which their EMV scores spike and some declare they “won” the week 00:12:0100:12:26. Ahmed is careful to say he genuinely likes and respects many of these celebrities as people and talents, but he separates that from the strategic question: does a spike in earned media attention actually move the needle on long-term brand health or revenue? He argues the data doesn’t support it, and offers Chanel as the proof: it’s the top-performing brand in the luxury sector right now, up sharply in a flat market, yet it doesn’t top these attention-based rankings 00:12:4600:12:57. If the metric correlated with commercial success, he reasons, the best-performing brand should be the one winning it.

He doesn’t dismiss the metrics entirely, which is itself a notable hedge. His concession is that they might be useful as a rough directional signal, for example telling you brand A generated more buzz than brand C this season, as long as nobody mistakes the invented dollar figure for anything scientific 00:13:2700:13:37. The real test he proposes is to keep attention metrics subordinate to the business fundamentals that actually define success: long-term brand health, revenue, and profit 00:14:06. Anything else, in his framing, is marketing teams grading their own homework.

AI, taste, and the limits of automation in creative work

A student’s question about the “rarest skill” luxury brands will still want humans for prompts Ahmed to push back on the question’s framing before answering it. He says he disagrees with the premise that AI can, on its own, generate beautiful campaigns, imagery, or strategy 00:16:29. In his view, every current application of AI in creative work still requires a human operator who supplies judgment at the point of decision, which means the technology hasn’t eliminated the human role so much as relocated it 00:16:5100:17:00.

He describes the emerging workflow less as automation replacing creativity and more as AI functioning as a kind of generative collaborator: a tool that can rapidly produce a wide range of options, from which a human then selects, recombines, and edits according to taste 00:17:4500:17:56. The skill that becomes more valuable, not less, in this arrangement is precisely the judgment used to sort good options from bad ones, and Ahmed frames this as an iterative back-and-forth rather than a one-shot prompt-and-publish process 00:17:3000:18:00.

His advice to the student is concrete and somewhat old-fashioned: build taste the way taste has always been built, through direct, physical exposure to culture, museums, print magazines, and real-world experience, because that reservoir of accumulated judgment is what will differentiate a person’s output once everyone has access to the same AI tools 00:18:3000:18:57. He stops short of claiming this guarantees a role for everyone, but the throughline of his answer is that the scarce resource in an AI-saturated industry won’t be access to generation tools, it will be the human discernment that decides what’s worth generating and keeping.

Crediting heritage: why Fendi and Prada aren’t the same story

On the question of Indian craft appearing in Western luxury collections, Ahmed resists collapsing recent controversies into a single narrative of appropriation. He starts from a broader observation: Indian cultural practices, from yoga to turmeric lattes, have spread globally often without public awareness of their origin, and he frames Indian culture as historically generous in allowing this kind of borrowing, calling the global reach of centuries-old traditions a kind of evidence of their enduring value 00:22:4400:23:57. That generosity, though, is not the same as consent to erase origin or skip compensation, and he treats the two recent incidents, Fendi’s mirror-worked Baguette bag and Prada’s Kolhapuri-style sandals, as sitting at very different points on that spectrum.

The Fendi case, in his account, reflects a genuine long-term relationship: Maria Grazia Chiuri has worked for years with Chanakya, the all-women Indian atelier run by Karishma Swali, across her tenures at Valentino, Dior, and now Fendi, and Ahmed describes having visited the atelier himself and seen the training and craftsmanship involved 00:24:2400:24:4100:24:51. His one real criticism is narrower than the public backlash suggested: Fendi’s failure wasn’t the collaboration itself but the product page, which didn’t explain the Indian technique or origin to customers, a missed opportunity for both education and added perceived value 00:25:2400:25:35.

Prada’s Kolhapuri sandals, by contrast, he treats as a genuine misstep, not just a PR failure. The sandals, instantly recognizable in India as coming from Kolhapur, appeared on the runway without any acknowledgment of their origin or any prior relationship with the artisans who make them, which Ahmed calls a real instance of appropriation rather than collaboration 00:25:5700:26:1300:26:22. He credits Prada with trying to make amends afterward, visiting Kolhapur, building relationships with artisans, and reportedly having the sandals produced there now 00:26:3100:26:38, but he frames this as remedial rather than exonerating. His broader prescription for the industry is explicit: if a brand draws on a specific culture’s techniques, it owes that culture credit, fair compensation, and customer education about where the work came from, since that transparency is what turns borrowing into something closer to honest collaboration 00:26:5600:27:04.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.