The Interline Podcast

Groups and conglomerates have dominated luxury for decades, but recent attempts to forge new ones have floundered. A new Irish group, steeped in the country’s heritage, is betting on technology making the difference.

To find out if it will, Ben sits down with Ashley McDonnell, CEO of VYKO Group.

Grace and Ben debate the top fashion headlines, including...

The push and pull between bespoke and general purpose AI, and off-the-shelf vs. custom technology in general: https://uk.fashionnetwork.com/news/Beauty-pie-replatforms-through-shopify-for-next-growth-phase,1852537.html and https://www.retaildive.com/news/customer-service-third-party-generative-ai-tools-brand-chatbots/825032/ and https://www.retail-week.com/technology/the-very-group-enters-agentic-ai-partnership-for-pricing/7051644.article and https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/thinking-machines-amps-up-its-bet-against-one-size-fits-all-ai-with-its-first-open-model-inkling/

New regulations and a new study that capture the tightening net around fintech, especially buy-now-pay-later platforms: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-delivers-fairer-deal-for-shoppers-as-buy-now-pay-later-rules-come-into-force

StockX's launch of mystery boxes, and the data behind the rise of odds-based decision making in retail: https://fashionunited.uk/news/retail/stockx-launches-mystery-boxes-with-verified-inventory/2026071089146

The influence of AI on advisory services in fashion, and vice versa: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/technology/ai-outside-consultants-advertising/

The internet's talent at making a running joke out of a manifestation of a deeper and less funny fit and field testing gap: https://fashionunited.uk/news/fashion/tiktok-users-call-out-zara-for-its-now-dubbed-deadly-trousers/2026070989112

Arne Arens made the unusual leap from being a brand executive to leading a technology company in fashion’s most unforgiving segment: manufacturing innovation. From creating net-new jobs to translating digital product creation outputs into seamless garments, his big bet is on this particular transformation taking root.

Ben puts the vision to the test.

This week, Ben and Grace discuss:

The launch of Meta's Muse image model, with opt-out likeness tagging - and the ongoing battle between human models are the companies they shoot for, who seem willing to misappropriate their likenesses: https://www.theverge.com/tech/962485/meta-muse-image-ai-model-instagram and https://wwd.com/sourcing-journal/industry-news/fashion-model-racial-discrimination-artificial-intelligence-1239051932/

The more tangible social impacts of AI-supporting data centre build-outs in the UK and abroad: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/scotland-lanarkshire-village-ai-datacentre

The growth of wardrobe-quantifying / cataloguing apps: https://www.just-style.com/news/whering-seed-funding-ai/?cf-view

Some positive uses of AI in sorting and separating textiles and second-hand garments: https://tech.eu/2026/07/08/berlins-reversefashion-bags-seven-figure-funding-to-scale-textile-sorting/ and https://thenextweb.com/news/fleek-25m-series-b-secondhand-fashion-ai

And the launch of ChatGPT Voice, based on the new GPT-Live model, and what it might mean for layering persuasion on top of a novel modality for interaction: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/

Zalando has pushed further than perhaps any other company in embedding generative AI into its content creation - from product page materials to full-blown creative campaigns - and in talking openly about it. But if cost-saving isn’t the primary objective, what is?

Ben talks to Glazione Rocha, Creative Director, to find out how a company at the bleeding edge of deploying AI for consumer-facing content approaches the work, and how they think about the impact of their choices.