Did Dior 'craft-wash' its holiday ad?

In the last month, several fashion brands debuted animated holiday campaigns. These campaigns from brands like Levi's, Prada and Dior positioned themselves as using older, more traditional art forms — from stop-motion to hand-drawn cel animation — in contrast to the rise of generative AI and "slop."

But in the ensuing weeks, one of these ads drew more scrutiny than the others. People started analyzing the Dior ad, made in collaboration with the acclaimed French animator Sylvain Chomet, going frame-by-frame and checking the details. Multiple posts on Instagram and Reddit began accusing the brand of using generative AI for its supposedly hand-crafted campaign.

On the Glossy Podcast this week, senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi and international reporter Zofia Zwieglinska discuss why brands are gravitating toward hand-crafted art in their campaigns, why they may be tempted to "craftwash" their marketing and what consequences brands face when the accusations of AI usage start to fly.

For the Dior ad, Chomet and the campaign's producer both spoke to Variety, denying accusations that they used AI to generate the ad, but admitting they used "automated interpolation to generate some of the intermediate frames." The problem is that there are many ways to interpolate animation frames. Some are not "generative AI" in the common understanding: simply algorithmically blending two frames together. Newer models use generative AI to create a completely new frame of animation.

It's unclear which of the two Chomet and his team used, but on social media, many have concluded that the premise of the ad — that it was entirely made by hand the old-fashioned way — is misleading.

"The worst part is that they were very prominently featuring the animation in the behind-the-scenes content, as well," Zwieglinska said. "An animator I spoke to said you can't assume that generating the in-between frames in animation also takes care of the creative decisions those frames might require. The fact that Jonathan Anderson himself said that it was entirely hand-drawn [means] you're making a claim that you'