I use AI. I used it to research this piece. I use it to draft emails, sort analytics, and think out loud at eleven at night. It is a tool, the way a steamer is a tool.
But there is one use of it I cannot make peace with. A person who makes things (a dressmaker, a sculptor, a hat maker, anyone whose whole pitch is “I made this”) advertising their work with a picture of something they never made. Not a photo of the garment. A rendering of a garment that has never been cut, sewn, or held.
A product photo is a receipt
When you make physical things, the photograph is not decoration. It is evidence. It says: this exists, it came out of my hands, and here is what those hands can do. The customer is not buying the picture. They are buying the fact behind it, and the picture is how they check.
Replace that photo with a generated image and the receipt becomes a proposal. A picture of what you wish were true, sitting in the exact spot where the truth is supposed to go. The customer pays for the fact and receives the wish.
At its worst, this is an old trick. A fly-by-night operation rented a storefront, filled the window, took deposits, and was gone before the checks cleared. The modern version skips the storefront. It needs a prompt. Most makers who reach for a generated image are not running that scam. Which is exactly why they should not borrow its method.
What arrives in the box
This is not hypothetical. Last fall the BBC investigated a wave of “family-run British boutiques” advertising on Facebook and Instagram. The founders in the photos were AI. The shopfronts were AI. One shop claimed twenty-nine years in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter and had a returns address in China. The dresses that arrived looked nothing like the ads, dozens of buyers wrote in, and Meta removed six of the companies, but only after the story ran. BBC, October and November 2025.
This spring, Slate found brides walking into salons holding AI images of gowns that cannot physically exist (sleeves on a strapless bodice), and scam sites selling AI-altered copies of designer dresses for a couple hundred dollars. One bride paid fifty-nine dollars for a dress that never arrived at all. Slate, May 2026.
And the small version has run on Etsy since 2023: crochet patterns sold with generated photos of finished plush toys no one had ever made. Buyers followed the pattern and got nothing like the picture, because nothing ever had. NBC News, 2024. That one is my favorite, in a grim way. The object in the photograph was never even possible.
Different products, different price points, same transaction. A picture of a thing that does not exist, sold as proof that it does.
A product photo is a receipt. A generated image is a proposal, sitting in the exact spot where the truth is supposed to go.
Where I draw the line
This is not a case for raw files. Photographers have retouched since photography existed, and a rendering labeled a rendering is honest. Architects have sold from sketches for a century.
The line is simple. Is the picture still evidence of the thing? Correct the light. Clean up the background. Photography has always involved interpretation. But the moment the image starts inventing the garment itself (its construction, its cloth, its fit), it has stopped documenting your work. Then the customer needs to know. And if you are a maker advertising your own craft, ask yourself why you would want them not to.
The regulators have landed in the same place. The FTC says there is no AI exemption from the laws on the books (FTC, 2024). The EU now requires generated images to be marked (European Commission). Etsy requires original photos of the finished product (Etsy), and Amazon began flagging generated people in product images this summer (eWeek). None of it will stop the practice. It just tells you which way the wind is blowing.
The real cost is trust. Last November, Santander found that 74 percent of adults could not spot a generated social media ad, and 63 percent now avoid buying through social media entirely (Santander UK, 2025). A generated garment does not cheat one buyer. It teaches the next buyer to distrust everyone, including the people who did the work.
Why a tailor cares
At the moment a client commissions a suit, the suit does not exist. There is a bolt of cloth, a set of measurements, and a conversation. Every order starts as a proposal. The work we have already made is the only physical evidence we can offer for the work we are asking you to trust us with next.
Which is why what we show has to be real. When a photo here shows a wedding tuxedo, it was cut, sewn, fitted, and worn on a wedding day. When it shows a cloth, that cloth is in a swatch book on our shelf, and you can come hold it. The image is the record of a thing that happened. The promise is that the next one will happen the same way. Take away the first half and there is nothing left to promise on.
So if the photographs here look a little less perfect than a rendering, a shoulder line that reflects an actual shoulder, a drape that reflects an actual afternoon, good. They are pictures of clothes. The clothes exist. I do not understand why anyone who makes things would want it any other way.
– Brett
