The Golden Age of Unrealism
We’re entering a golden age of visual imagination—and absolutely none of it has to be real.
Many of you will have seen Alexis Ohanian animating an image of his mother with Midjourney. It’s tender, intimate, haunting. Creepy.
Or you saw Paige Piskin’s wild work on Instagram for the swimsuit brand TA3, creating a stunning, weird, subversive shoot from her living room. She, and others like her, are conjuring surreal selfie-worlds. It’s not just a filter, it’s an aesthetic reset.
Or you’re little old me… As many of you know, I’ve been working on a side hustle, Parasol Sport—visors for women who play tennis or pickle and are sick of the lack of sun coverage from a baseball cap or similar. Like any good marketer, I’ve got to feed the Meta beast with video content. (for those of you that don’t know me, um… I wish I looked like this. The original image was of me)
I think we can all see where this is going.
My Reality Check
Making content for Parasol has been a reality check in many ways. Trying to keep up with performance creative demands—constant video, iteration, hooks—is basically a full-time job.
As I mentioned earlier this month, this basically REQUIRES AI help. To quote myself: AI + brand guidelines + human whimsy = success.
We’ve moved from branded campaigns to what feels like a never-ending audition on This Brand’s Got Talent (for engaging imagery in Reels/TikTok Stories/etc).
Creativity Without Constraints: Magic + Boring
In many ways, this is marvelously cool. AI is unleashing a new type of art—raw, expressive, weirdly democratic. I read somewhere that there hasn’t been a massive new art movement—one that made waves, drove controversy, in short shifted the narrative—since Conceptual Art in the 1960s–1970s.
If you buy that argument, we’re long overdue for a paradigm shift.
Do I buy it? Maybe. My work with KnownOrigin and blockchain in general made me excited about a real digital reckoning for art, and this AI wave feels like the second shock of that change. But I digress.
How will this affect style? Hard to say in the long run, but for now, speculative imagery is a feature, not a bug: leopard-themed campaigns, surrealist scenes, magical realism as marketing.
That might sound brand-forward rather than performance-focused—if not for some amazing innovations in e-commerce, like Target’s “see this dress on three different sizes” or Google Shopping’s new size-aware image tool.
(Note: I still OBVIOUSLY think there’s room for more actual fit/measurement data to be applied to this imagery. But a girl can dream/build/hustle. #FitFit.ai)
So it’s magical realism meets practical Google Shopping. Not a bad combo.
But... Fit, Size, and the Return of the Idealized Body
What happens when the body in the ad isn’t real?
AI-generated models are often unrealistically proportioned—either aspirational or algorithmically “average.”
Did you see my guns?? Most of you haven’t met me in real life, but let me assure you: your author does not have those triceps.
Fit becomes fantasy. The suit that fits your avatar might not exist in a size that fits you. While we do have tools like Google Shopping showing real bodies, the imagery being sold to us is VERY PERFECT.
I Thought Our Avatars Would Be Different
Long ago, I spent more time talking about Roblox and the creativity spewing from kids describing how they were going to look. And yet now, playing with Doji—the avatar dress-up app I flagged last time—I’m noticing how everyone looks... the same.
Here’s me and my friend Lucy’s. We look NOTHING alike in real life. WDYT?
Is this homogenization masquerading as personalization? As a mother of daughters, this feels especially dangerous for girls growing up in this visual culture.
The future of fashion might be infinite. But right now, it looks a lot like one size fits all.
Dazzled and Disoriented
The golden age of unrealism is dazzling—but it’s also disorienting.
What we choose to show, and how real we make it, matters.
If reality is optional now, we should think carefully about what we’re replacing it with.