Vogue World 2026: Milano was full of thrilling moments, from the live cover of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” by Alicia Keys to the myriad dance sequences and many celebrity cameos.
But perhaps the most surprising of them all? When, during the show’s fourth act, titled “The Age of Intelligence,” four humanoid robots took a stroll down the runway of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.
Vogue World: Milano was conceived as an ode to Italian craft and innovation, offering in addition a broader examination of human creativity and artistry in the age of artificial intelligence. The team behind Vogue World brought in the bots, created by Unitree Robotics, to underscore the latter theme—and if their presence amid top models such as Alex Consani, Ruth Deng, and Yumi Nu seemed a little uncanny, that was entirely the point.
“The robots came into the conversation to represent this very moment that we’re living through, which is the beginning of robotics,” says Vogue World 2026: Milano’s creative director, Juan Costa Paz. “They’re still very clunky—you know, like how the first cellphones were suitcase-sized—but the robots are meant to be an inflection point in human history.”
“It’s fun,” Costa Paz adds, “because robots are fun. But it’s also terrifying and is meant to say, AI is not going away, and the robots are not going away.”
The presence of robots during Vogue World: Milan echoed the storytelling in a video created for Vogue by Bardia Zeinalli, starring the (very real) Italian supermodel Vittoria Ceretti. The short film, which reimagined Ceretti as “Vittori-AI” and incorporated AI-generated effects by the creative duo Hunter Hornof, delineated the limits of machine learning in matters of taste, emotion, and other intrinsically human traits and qualities.
“While technology can generate ideas and imitate styles, people bring their own experiences and emotion to art and that will forever be irreplaceable,” Ceretti previously told Vogue, describing the project’s ethos. Added Zeinalli: “I think I really wanted to make a piece that gave people a little bit of reassurance about what’s happening, where we’re headed, and to feel confidence and security in their humanity.”
