Major Pakistani fashion brands like Ethnc, Sana Safinaz, and generation have started a new trend: they are replacing real human models with AI. They are cutting costs by lifting the hard work of humans, tricking customers, and taking away jobs from local creatives.
Stealing Faces Without Consent
Brands are cloning the faces and bodies of real Pakistani models without their permission. They take specific physical details from a model’s old campaigns, change them slightly using AI, and create a fake digital model.
Copying Human Work
We spoke to award-winning fashion photographer Aleena Naqvi (@snaqvi) about the growing use of AI in fashion photography. She highlighted the hypocrisy of brands promoting sustainability while ignoring AI’s huge environmental impact. Instead of paying real talent, they are copying the features, poses, and hard work of models they hired before.
Tricking the Customers
Brands thought people would like it, but customers want to see real clothes on real people. AI models fail to show accurate fit, sizing, and fabric texture, leaving shoppers feeling misled.
Fake Beauty Standards
In Pakistan, people already face pressure about skin color and body shape. AI can make this worse by showing unrealistically perfect faces, bodies, and skin instead of representing real Pakistani people.
Hidden Environmental Damage
In their corporate boardrooms, these fast-fashion empires conveniently leave out the environmental problems tied to AI. They claim it is “sustainable,” but running heavy AI data centers uses massive amounts of electricity and millions of gallons of water. Even worse, AI helps these brands design and launch cheap outfits faster, directly fueling an overproduction crisis that dumps tons of textile waste straight into Pakistan’s landfills.