When Imperfection Becomes Luxury

In the coming years, we will have access to an unprecedented amount of synthetic beauty. Generative Artificial Intelligence is driving the marginal cost of visual production towards zero: a perfect, technically flawless, aesthetically calibrated image can be generated for free and in milliseconds. This inflation of visual content—still in its early stages but destined to accelerate—will bring with it a consequence we are beginning to glimpse: when everything is beautiful, nothing will be anymore. When perfection becomes a commodity, perfection will cease to evoke emotion. And when abundance turns into saturation, the market will shift elsewhere, towards what cannot be replicated, towards what will remain scarce: human intention. Art—that made by human beings, with their biographies, their bodies, their uncertainties—will become the definitive marker of value, because it carries with it something no machine can ever reproduce: the trace of a conscious choice, a journey, an accepted fallibility.

Sartre wrote that man is condemned to be free, free even to die. The artist is condemned to choose, and every work carries the weight of all the choices not made, traces of which inevitably remain in the artifact.

Brands Between Efficiency and Meaning

For decades, luxury has been associated with craftsmanship perfection, attention to detail, and the rarity of materials. An Hermès bag was valuable because it required hours of manual labor by specialized artisans. A Patek Philippe watch was valuable because it contained mechanisms of millimeter precision. Luxury coincided with technical excellence combined with scarcity: the more perfect and difficult an object was to replicate, the more it was worth.

In the coming years, this equation will break. Artificial Intelligence will be able to produce photorealistic renderings of bags, watches, and jewelry that are technically indistinguishable—often superior—to the originals. It will be able to generate infinite design variations, optimized to maximize aesthetic appeal according to statistical parameters derived from millions of human preferences. Technical perfection, in other words, will become accessible to anyone with a computer and a well-written prompt.

In this scenario, luxury will shift toward the aura of the artifact. Walter Benjamin already intuited in the 1930s that technical reproducibility would drain the work of art of its aura, of that unique and unrepeatable presence linked to the here and now of its creation. Today, we witness a paradox: while reproducibility becomes infinite and instantaneous, it is precisely the aura—what cannot be reproduced—that becomes the only true luxury.

Companies today face a crossroads. On one side, there is efficiency: synthetically generated content, perfect images at near-zero cost, advertising campaigns optimized by algorithms that maximize immediate ROI. On the other side, there is meaning: investing in human art, commissioning works from flesh-and-blood artists, building relationships with creatives who cannot be replaced by a machine learning model.

The temptation to choose the first path is strong. Why spend a hundred thousand euros on a photographic campaign with an acclaimed photographer when an AI can generate a thousand equivalent images in an hour? Why commission a work from an artist when Midjourney can produce infinite variations on any style in seconds? Why pay a designer when an algorithm can optimize every single visual element according to scientifically proven conversion metrics?

More than an ethical choice, it is a strategic choice. Brands that choose the path of synthetic efficiency will build effective short-term campaigns, but will lose something fundamental: the capacity to signify. They will become indistinguishable from one another, because all will draw from the same ocean of statistical probabilities. They will be perceived as cheap, not because their products are inexpensive, but because their visual language will lack the aura that only human intention can confer.

Conversely, brands that continue to invest in human art—in auteur photography, in collaborations with artists, in the creation of commissioned works—will build a competitive moat.

Art as an Archive of Fallibility

There is one aspect of art that artificial intelligence can never genuinely simulate: not fallibility, but its meaning. The human artist carries the weight of their own biography. Every work is the result of choices that could have been different, but also could not, of second thoughts, of accepted errors, of compromises between vision and possibility. A brush sliding across the canvas does not follow a probability distribution: it is a unique, unrepeatable event, determined by physical, emotional, and contextual factors that no model can capture.

It is this fallibility that creates depth. When we look at a Bacon painting, we don't just see shapes and colors: we see the trace of a struggle, of a tension between control and loss of control. When we look at a David LaChapelle photograph, we don't just see a composition: we see conscious excess, chromatic saturation pushed to the limit of collapse, a tension between the sacred and the profane that only a specific biography could generate. When we look at an Olafur Eliasson installation, we don't just see technology and light: we see years of experimentation, failed attempts, and intuitions built by accumulation.

This depth—this stratification of time, body, choice, and fallibility—is what AI cannot produce. It can simulate the appearance, but not the substance. And the public, increasingly literate regarding the language of machines, will learn to distinguish. They will learn to recognize when an image is the result of a statistical probability and when it is the result of a human intention. And this distinction will become the new determinant of value.

The Brand Manager as Custodian of the Human

In this scenario, the role of the brand manager radically transforms. They are no longer just a manager of communication flows, they are not just an optimizer of campaigns. They become a curator of humanity. Their task is not to maximize short-term efficiency, but to build an archive of human gestures that accumulates value over time.

This means making uneconomical choices in the short term. It means forgoing the immediate efficiency of synthetically generated content to invest in a collaboration with an artist that requires months of work, complex negotiations, and uncertain results. It means accepting that a work of art cannot be optimized for quarterly ROI, because its value is manifested over much longer time horizons.

But it is precisely this apparent inefficiency that builds the defensive moat. When, in ten years, the market is completely saturated with synthetic content, when every brand can generate infinite variations of perfect, zero-cost campaigns, what will distinguish one company from another? Not the product features, which will all be commoditized. Not the prices, which will tend to converge. Not the distribution, which will be ubiquitous. What will distinguish a brand will be the cultural heritage it has built: collaborations with artists, commissioned works, open foundations, curated photographic archives. That heritage cannot be replicated, because it is linked to specific choices made at unrepeatable historical moments.

Consider Olivetti. Its typewriters have been technologically dead for decades. No one uses them to write anymore. Yet the Olivetti brand maintains enormous reputational value, its products are exhibited in museums, the name still evokes innovation and culture. Why? Because Adriano Olivetti did not limit himself to producing efficient machines: he built a cultural ecosystem made of architecture, design, art, poetry. He invested in humanism as industrial infrastructure. And that heritage survived even the technological death of the product.

The question every brand must ask itself in the coming years is not "can we afford to invest in art?", but "can we afford not to, while everything else becomes a commodity?". The answer will determine who survives and who disappears in the ocean of synthetic perfection.