ATLIER — Issue No. 12 p. 048

The Machine Has
Good Taste

Salvatore Russo, founder of RUSSO talent, on dressing the algorithm, what an agency owes its models in the age of generative imagery, and why the most human thing on a runway might soon be the lighting.

Interview by Caterina Lo Bianco · Portraits by Mireia Sant

Salvatore, the joke in Milan is that you signed your first AI model before half the city had signed up to ChatGPT. Is that true?

Not quite. We signed our first synthetic face in late 2023, but I had been watching the technology for two years before that. People assumed we were chasing a gimmick. We weren't. We were trying to understand what an agency even means when an image can be conjured at no cost.

So what does it mean?

An agency exists for two reasons: to protect a person and to put a point of view into the world. The second part doesn't change because of AI. The first part changes completely. Every face we represent — human or otherwise — needs a contract that says how it can be reproduced, retouched, retrained on, replaced. Without that, you are not an agency. You are a stock library.

RUSSO talent represents both human models and digital ones. How do you keep the human side of the roster from feeling threatened?

By paying them better, frankly. The fee we used to spend on a three-day shoot in Marrakech is now split across one shoot day and a licensing window. The model earns more for less time on set. And when a client wants to generate variants of her at scale, she earns again. The technology, used honestly, is a raise. Used dishonestly, it is theft.

Used honestly, the technology is a raise. Used dishonestly, it is theft.

Let’s talk about the clothes. Where does fashion sit inside this?

Fashion has always been the laboratory for the next body. Schiaparelli sketched lobsters on silk before anyone knew what to do with surrealism. Mugler engineered a torso out of resin. We are doing the same thing with code. A garment, today, can know who is wearing it. It can change weight depending on the weather, the city, even the heart rate of the person inside it. That is not science fiction — our atelier shipped a sample of it last March.

Critics say AI-generated imagery is flattening fashion — same girl, same light, same beach.

They are right and they are wrong. The default output of any tool is mediocrity. A camera in the wrong hands also produces a flat picture. The job of a creative director hasn’t changed: refuse the obvious. We have an internal rule —

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— if a brief could have been shot in 1998 with a Pentax, we don’t deliver it. The machine has to earn its place in the frame. Otherwise we have spent a decade of culture on more of the same.

You’ve said in interviews that the most human thing on a runway is the lighting. Explain.

Everything else can be simulated now. The face, the fabric, the walk, the city behind it. What still cannot be faked convincingly is the way a real lamp behaves in a real room over twelve seconds — how it flickers, how it warms up, how a body absorbs and bounces it. When I watch a show, I look at the lighting. That tells me whether a human was actually there.

Let’s talk about consent. A synthetic face still has a likeness donor — usually several. How do you handle that?

It is the single most serious question in the room and most of the industry pretends it is solved. It is not. Every synthetic face on our roster is built from contributors we name in the contract, who are paid every time the face works, and who can withdraw at any time. If a donor withdraws, we retire the face. We’ve done it twice. It cost us a campaign. It was the right call.

If a donor withdraws, we retire the face. We’ve done it twice. It was the right call.

And the human models? Do they sign anything new now?

They sign a clause we wrote ourselves. It says, in plain Italian: your face is not training data. A client cannot ingest a campaign you shot for them into a model and then generate “new” you. If they want to do that, they license it — explicitly, with a number, with a window, with a kill switch. Half our peer agencies still haven’t written this clause. They will, after the first lawsuit.

You also direct GLORY, an experimental theatre cycle in Leipzig. People are surprised to see a fashion-agency founder making seven-hour seminars on a public square.

It’s the same job. Both are about staging a body in front of an audience and asking what is real about it. The agency pays for the theatre. The theatre teaches the agency that an image without a body behind it eventually goes thin.

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ATLIER — Issue No. 12 · continued p. 053

Last question. In ten years, what does RUSSO talent look like?

Smaller. Slower. More expensive. The agencies that survive this decade will be the ones who refused to flood the world with cheap faces. We will represent maybe forty people and forty synthetic identities, all of them with a story you can verify, all of them paid like artists. The clients who want a thousand variants of a generic girl will go elsewhere — and they should. We are not in that business.

A final word?

Dress the algorithm the way you would dress a child going to a wedding. With care. With taste. With the understanding that the room will judge you, not the algorithm.

Salvatore Russo is the founder of RUSSO talent, Milan, and the director of GLORY, an experimental seminar cycle running in Leipzig, June–July 2026. Caterina Lo Bianco writes on fashion and image rights for ATLIER. Mireia Sant’s portraits have appeared in System, Apartamento and Re-edition.

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The Machine HasGood Taste

The Machine Has
Good Taste