Just how stylish is the ghost in the machine? Fashion might be just about to find out.

When Ralph Lauren took to the web 25 years ago, it was one of the first designer brands to make a big push online, looking to carve out its own bit of digital Americana early. 

That launch included Ask Ralph, featuring 100 commonly asked fashion questions answered by the designer himself and his team. 

Now there’s a new high-tech member of that team ready to weigh in on just what Ralph Lauren fashion is as Ask Ralph relaunches Tuesday as an artificially intelligent shopping experience on the brand’s app. 

“The most difficult thing for any company is to find the right technology to help you tell your story,” said David Lauren, the company’s chief branding and innovation officer, in an interview. 

“Over 25 years we’ve explored a lot of different technologies. Some of them have been totally groundbreaking and have helped to change our industry and some of them disappear,” he said. “This feels like a very obvious opportunity. Not just because everybody’s talking about it, but because it has an ability to learn with us.”

There’s plenty to learn in the world of Ralph Lauren and already the AI, which has been under development for a year, has absorbed a lot, from the designer’s personal take on style to how that philosophy has been absorbed by his team and how it all has translated into the brand’s DNA.

“[AI] has the ability to sort of absorb our incredible archive as well as the words,” Lauren said. “We use the pictures and our philosophy and put it all together and make sense of it.”

Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, the chat-based service uses natural language processing to serve up shoppable visual laydowns of complete outfits. 

So a query on just what to wear to a wedding in Miami in December will pull up a carousel of options that can be added to one’s cart and bought immediately. 

In a preview test at the brand’s Prince Street store in Manhattan’s SoHo shopping district, the service seemed, like Ralph Lauren in general, very buttoned up. The experience felt commercially oriented, offering up looks that can be bought at the moment and avoiding questions that might send it off course. 

Asked how to dress in the style of Tommy Hilfiger or if President Donald Trump wore Polo, the technology demurred. 

AI’s launch into the world has led to any number of slip-ups and embarrassing hallucinations, but Ask Ralph does not seem primed to make any big fashion faux pas. 

“We’re not here to try to be clever with it,” Lauren said. “Our aim was to pull from a live inventory of what’s on the site right now. There is a whole section that pulls from the archive and the history and gives you the philosophy, but the piece that I think is going to be most valuable to customers is sort of what’s really shoppable.”

This is the first time the brand has had a consumer-facing AI tool. Lauren said the future was still wide open and that Ask Ralph could eventually become voice-activated, integrate the Collection business or be added to other platforms. 

“It’s going to become more and more valuable quickly,” Lauren said. “We know that everybody’s talking about artificial intelligence, but we wanted to explore it, use it, and learn. We’re confident that this is going to be a valuable tool, but we also recognize that what it is right now is the very beginning.”

Generative AI is almost universally seen as a business and cultural game changer — potentially on the order of the iPhone or the internet itself — but there is still little consensus on just what the mid-term impact will be, other than big. 

McKinsey & Co. estimated that generative AI will add $150 billion to $275 billion to fashion’s operating profits by 2030. 

That would include supply chain and other back office efficiencies, changes to the workforce and new ways to connect with consumers, like the Ask Ralph feature. 

Just what AI means to the future of fashion might be the big question in the industry, but it’s too big a question to answer right from the start, so Ralph Lauren is just leaning in for now.

“Everybody walks in and they want, ‘How big can it be? How fast can it grow?’” Lauren said. “That’s not really how we’re doing this. For us, this is very incremental. We have key learnings we’re trying to measure for every week.

“What we know is that we have the tool that’s going to help us get to the place we want to get to, and that over the next year it’s going to become so much smarter that by the end of this year you’ll be saying ‘Ralph Lauren led again.’” 

Lauren is reaching for the stars, but not promising the moon. 

“Perfectionism is important in fashion, but it can also stop you from taking risks and moving forward,” Lauren said. “I think we know that there’s a good marriage here, but it’s going to have to grow together to get stronger and better.

“Everybody’s racing. Don’t. Just stop racing. Set your own pace, understand who you are and move carefully to understand how your brand is best married to technology. And don’t rush to keep up with: ‘I have to change, I have to evolve. It has to be the hottest new thing.’ That’s what’s killed a lot of fashion. 

“What makes good brands work is that they understand who they are and they know how to evolve carefully with the right pace that’s right for their brand,” Lauren said. “We’ve done that over 60 years. Ralph Lauren today is not the same company as it was when it started, or else we would just be a tie.”