The people getting the most extraordinary results from AI are those with the deepest craft: the designers, makers and storytellers who know precisely what they’re reaching for. AI is only ever as good as the craft you bring to it. The future belongs to those who master both.
Matthew Drinkwater has spent his career where fashion meets new technology, moving from wearables and immersive experiences into one of creativity’s biggest questions: what changes when machines can make too?
Matthew Drinkwater came into innovation through fashion and retail.
At London College of Fashion, he went on to build a practice around what happens when emerging technologies enter a creative discipline.
What counted as emerging kept changing.
Wearables gave way to augmented reality. AR to VR and immersive experiences. Then generative AI arrived and moved the debate from what technology could add to creative work towards whether it might replace parts of it altogether.
Drinkwater’s response is rooted in the years before AI.
New tools, in his experience, do not remove the value of craft. They expose it. The strongest results come from designers, makers and storytellers who understand their discipline deeply enough to know what they want the technology to do.
He now works on questions including AI and copyright while continuing to explore how computational tools change creativity, identity and representation.
Drinkwater crossed from fashion into technology years ago. His argument now is that the most interesting future belongs to people capable of moving confidently in both directions.
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