BoF Voices

Overview

Location: Oxfordshire
Type: Thought Leadership
Year: 2023

BoF VOICES is Business of Fashion's annual invitation-only gathering for big thinkers, held each year at Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire, uniting leaders across fashion, luxury and beauty with entrepreneurs and creatives shaping culture at large. In 2023, Kelly Wearstler joined the lineup alongside artist Andres Reisinger, sitting on a panel most of the design industry still wasn't ready to have in public, one that argued artificial intelligence belonged inside a creative studio as a working collaborator, not outside it as a threat to guard against.

Kelly Wearstler — BoF Voices — diptych-img-text-1

Common Ground

Interior design was wrestling with generative AI just as visibly as fashion was by 2023, and Wearstler had a head start on that conversation, her studio had been building the technology into its process since 2021, well before it was a stage-ready topic anywhere. That made Kelly a natural fit for a gathering whose whole premise is that the industry learns more from voices working the same pressures in adjacent fields than from another round of its own executives, an outside discipline paired with an early adopter inside it.

Kelly Wearstler — BoF Voices — collage-layout-1

The Conversation

Wearstler and Reisinger arrived at the same conclusion from entirely different disciplines, which was the point of putting them on stage together: that the tool never touches the part of the job that actually matters, the eye deciding what's worth keeping. She used the Hume Bench as her case study, ideas moving between mediums in ways a purely linear process never would have allowed, and went further, reframing AI's mistakes, the extra fingers, the misplaced elbows, as usable material rather than errors to discard, a happy accident with real creative value. From there she made the business case: that speed is a constraint on creativity long before it's a technical one, and that more options, handled with real taste, produce sharper results rather than diluted ones.