Luxury Briefing: Vêtir aims to bring luxury brands into the AI era

On its first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Macy’s said it had introduced Ask Macy’s, an AI-powered conversational shopping assistant that helps customers discover products across channels. CEO Tony Spring said the tool is still new, but customers using it are showing higher conversion rates. Macy’s plans to soon take the technology to Bloomingdale’s, where the assistant will be called Ask Bloomingdale’s.

“We view AI and humanity working together, and that creates the best possible results,” Spring said on the call.

But in-house at luxury brands, the challenge is harder. AI can improve search, recommendations and conversion, but luxury selling still depends on tone, context and trust. A generic assistant may find a black blazer, but it won’t understand why one belongs in a client’s wardrobe.

That is the gap Vêtir is trying to fill.

The 2-year-old AI-powered luxury wardrobe platform, founded by Kate Davidson Hudson, announced on May 15 that it had raised a $5.5 million Series A at a $150 million valuation. The company said it has seen 200% month-over-month organic user growth over the past year, alongside 9x year-over-year revenue growth, 3,500% growth in B2B clients and an average order value exceeding $2,500. Davidson Hudson said the platform has about 1.8 million monthly visits.

Vêtir is not a membership business. For shoppers, the app works as a luxury wardrobe and shopping platform, where users can build a digital closet, receive styling recommendations and buy products from Vêtir’s brand and retail partners. Vêtir makes money through affiliate sales when shoppers buy through the platform.

For stylists, access is gated rather than paid. Stylists do not pay a fee, but they must meet certain thresholds to join, including managing at least $1 million in client spending, Davidson Hudson said. They also have to onboard their clients, so they can manage wardrobes, send recommendations and build outfits through Vêtir.

Now, Vêtir is pushing further into enterprise sales, selling the technology powering its consumer app, digital closet, AI stylist and stylist dashboard to brands. “We’ve just launched, and will be announcing a couple of partners this quarter,” Davidson Hudson told Glossy.

Vêtir’s argument is that luxury cannot simply copy the mass-retail version of AI shopping. The company has been training its model for nearly five years on what Davidson Hudson describes as the top 1% luxury consumer. She said that gives the platform a more specific read on how high-net-worth shoppers discover products, work with stylists and use their wardrobes after purchase — data that is in demand among brands.

Vêtir’s enterprise product allows brands to add its AI stylist to their own website or app. It also includes a clienteling dashboard, or CRM, that lets brands and stylists manage customer wardrobes, recommendations and follow-up in one place.

The most visual part of the offer is Style This Piece, a tool that connects to a brand’s product catalog and builds complete looks around one item. A customer looking at a blazer, for example, could be shown five outfits using the brand’s catalog or, where available, pieces from their own digital closet. The customer can then chat with the AI stylist to change a shoe, ask a fit question or refine the look.

Davidson Hudson called it “light touch AI.” She said that was very intentional. “When you get too technical and it gets too dense, their eyes glaze over,” she said, referring to luxury executives. She added that French luxury brands — such as those from Kering and LVMH — have been especially cautious.

With Style This Piece, the sales case is easier to understand. “Instead of selling you a skirt, the AI stylist is now selling you a skirt, a shirt and a pair of shoes,” she said.

The full-look idea is already being discussed inside luxury by others. In a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Kering CEO Luca de Meo, de Meo suggested Boucheron could involve Kering fashion designers in high-jewelry presentations, allowing the house to sell “not just the jewel, but a complete look.” Boucheron creative director Claire Choisne replied, “We would love that. We’ve never managed to make it happen.”

Brunello Cucinelli has been testing a related idea on its own website. Its AI-driven site, launched in January, adapts the shopping journey based on intent, rather than sending every visitor through the same product grid. In practice, that means using AI to move shoppers toward more relevant products and complete outfit suggestions. Francesco Bottigliero, the brand’s chief of humanistic technology, told Glossy that “the silent criteria in fashion shopping have always been the intent or context behind the fashion shopping mission.”

Vêtir is taking that same problem into the clienteling layer. The company’s bet is that luxury will take to AI that understands not only what a shopper is looking for, but also what they already own, how they work with a stylist and how they get dressed.

Davidson Hudson said she learned quickly that the stylist relationship is not an inefficiency to solve for.

“At the luxury end of the market, it should be AI in the service of the human experience, not replacing it,” she said. “You can’t undermine the relationship between a VIC and their stylist because that has huge emotional value.”

Vetir’s enterprise version can be adjusted to a brand’s voice, including in native languages. “The substance of what they’re conveying is the same, essentially,” she said. “But in terms of delivery, it can all be customized.”

Vêtir will still have to persuade luxury houses that have been slow to let AI into client-facing channels. “At my previous company [Editorialist], we were the first to put Cartier and Van Cleef online, and at that time, they were also like, ‘We are never going online,’” she said. “They all come around eventually. It just feels like that exact same moment in time, but it’s just with AI.”

For brands, the test will be whether AI can add service without making the experience feel automated. Davidson Hudson said luxury has always been built on a promise of personalization and bespoke attention.

“Luxury made that promise at inception,” she said. “And that’s what you’re paying for.”

Turns out, AI reads the press

Luxury brands have spent the last decade chasing reach, but the next decade may be more about authority.

That was suggested by Launchmetrics CEO Michael Jais in a recent interview with Glossy. Jais said the fashion-tech company is expanding beyond a focus on media impact value to include tools that measure brand identity, cultural relevance and brands’ presence in large language models.

For example, Launchmetrics recently ran an LLM-monitoring prototype around the Watches and Wonders event, using more than 3,500 prompts to see how top watch brands ranked in AI-generated answers. According to Jais, the sources carrying the most weight were not social platforms, but instead traditional media, news sources and niche editorial sites. That raises a new question for luxury brands that have spent the last decade chasing social reach: What happens if AI search rewards a different kind of authority? “If 75% of your customers rely on LLMs and not on social anymore to select brands, then what does it mean?” Jais said. “That questions the strategies that the brands have been leading with in the last 10 years.”

It is a useful warning for brands that have over-indexed on partnerships with celebrities and influencers, and on social-first moments. Editorial coverage, niche authority and consistent brand storytelling may become harder to treat as soft PR metrics, especially as Launchmetrics works to connect communications data to pricing, assortment and sales.

Executive moves

• OTB is taking full control of Viktor & Rolf after first buying 51% of the brand in 2008 and raising its stake to 70% in 2019. Founders Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren will remain creative directors for another five years.

News to know

• On June 3, the U.S. proposed new tariffs of at least 10% on imports from 60 trading partners, including the E.U. and the U.K., following a forced-labor investigation, with public comments due July 6 and hearings set to begin July 7.
• PVH reported declining quarterly sales at both Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, then lowered its full-year revenue outlook. This sent shares down 22% as investors looked past its $100 million tariff benefit.
• Kering avoided immediate unilateral layoffs at McQueen after Italian unions pushed back on plans to cut 54 of the brand’s 181 employees, with departures now postponed until September as the group works through its wider restructuring plan.
• Rent the Runway’s first quarter showed momentum after Jennifer Hyman’s exit, with revenue up 29.2% to $87.8 million, active subscribers up 5.8% and net losses narrowing to $18.9 million.
• Victoria’s Secret & Co. said on its June 2 earnings call that Q1 net sales rose 15% to $1.56 billion. Its strongest customer growth came from households earning under $50,000 and over $200,000.

Listen in

Pitti Uomo returns this month with menswear’s usual lineup of tailoring, footwear and elevated basics, but the bigger story may be what stylish men are buying outside the trade show floor: vintage. As secondhand menswear gains momentum, new brands are competing not just with each other but also with decades of collections from Ralph Lauren, Armani, Levi’s and Brooks Brothers already circulating on eBay, Depop, and in vintage stores. On this week’s Glossy Podcast, menswear writer and creator Albert Muzquiz, better known as @edgyalbert, joins senior reporter Danny Parisi to discuss why menswear’s vintage obsession has become impossible for brands to ignore. Listen here.

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