The myth of the muse: How AI fashion design platforms and prompting reshape creative agency

This article examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) design platforms are reshaping fashion and textile design by mediating creative processes, reconfiguring design roles and influencing aesthetic outcomes. While these design practices have traditionally relied on embodied techniques such as sketching or draping, AI platforms shift the creative process towards prompt-writing, thus transforming the designer’s role into one of linguistic precision. These systems not only facilitate design but also condition imaginaries, authorship and aesthetic norms. Drawing on an AI-augmented walkthrough methodology, we analyse four platforms through two themes: what we term the ‘limits of democratization’ and the ‘myth of the muse’. We show how platforms position themselves as accessible and inspirational while at the same time depending on opaque infrastructures, embedding aesthetic biases and upholding technical gatekeeping. Claims to democratization often obscure the need for professional knowledge and prompt fluency and overlook how defaults marginalize certain bodies, identities and styles. At the same time, the framing of AI as a muse conceals the constrained, algorithmically structured nature of digital creativity. Drawing on theories of ‘cultural infrastructure’, ‘distributed agency’ and ‘market agencements’, we examine how interface design, algorithmic suggestions and user scripts configure what can be created, who is positioned as a designer, and how creative practice is recognized and valued within fashion design culture. These dynamics show that AI design platforms do not simply mediate creativity; they reconfigure design practices and redistribute creative agency. Rather than serving as neutral tools, they function as socio-technical systems embedded in cultural and commercial infrastructures. By offering a critical, design-led perspective, this article contributes to understanding how generative AI reshapes the conditions under which fashion is imagined, produced and valued, thereby advancing emerging debates on AI and creativity in fashion.