Upstream innovation, in materials, processing, and production, has had a chequered few years. Promising pilots routinely fail to take flight or achieve commercial scale.

Ben talks to Stephen Bates, CEO of RHEON LABS, to assess what success on the journey from lab to big-label deployment might actually look like.

This week on The Edit: five fresh headline stories from across fashion and technology receive the quickfire analysis treatment.

First: Anthropic releases and is then forced to retract its new Fable 5 model - https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

Second: new data from Adobe suggests that AI interactions can increase retail conversions by 54%, and token budgets per employee appear less out-of-control than analysts suspected - https://business.adobe.com/blog/adobe-report-ai-traffic-travel-sites-surges-200-percent and https://ramp.com/data/ai-index

Third: Epic Games' demonstration of their creative teams' worfklows, which incorporate some AI, ignites debate. At the same time, the company set out its stall for seeing Unreal 6 as the opportunity to massively expand the utility and portability of skins - https://www.ign.com/articles/fortnite-maker-confirms-how-it-uses-generative-ai-to-help-create-concept-art-and-designs-for-new-skins and https://www.theverge.com/games/951785/epic-games-fortnite-unreal-fest-2026-unreal-engine-6-ai-metaverse

Fourth: secondary market giant StockX will be opening its first permanent retail store, as well as allowing for live shopping and direct interactions between sellers and buyers: https://fashionunited.uk/news/retail/stockx-reopens-soho-store-as-its-first-permanent-retail-location-in-the-us/2026061788698 and https://www.businessoffashion.com/briefings/sports/the-kicks-you-wear-why-stockx-is-launching-live-shopping/

Fifth: Charlotte Tillbury makes a renewed case for the "beauty technology" label, and we consider the advantage that beauty has over fashion when it comes to locating innovation closer to the consumer - https://www.fastcompany.com/91556648/why-i-designed-charlotte-tilbury-beauty-as-a-technology-company

Fashion devotes a lot of time to securing its inputs, but the importance of water to the industry’s supply chain goes under-discussed, and water is not quantified and assessed the way carbon is. But as water justice becomes a more acute business continuity risk, the demand to reckon with fashion’s thirst is growing.

Ben talks to Amira Jehia, Founding Executive Director of Drip By Drip, to understand why water impact quantification lags behind carbon footprint assessment, despite representing a more acute risk in the short term.

The first edition of The Edit, a new weekly show where Social Editor Grace interviews Editor-in-Chief Ben about five headline stories from across fashion and technology in less than 25 minutes.

This week the team pick up and analyse:

• DRESSX and Depop tackle virtual try-on for the secondary market:
  • https://retailtechinnovationhub.com/home/2026/6/7/dressx-teams-with-depop-on-series-of-ai-powered-resale-styling-and-virtual-try-on-activations
• Asda and Amazon pursue different slants on warehouse automation:
  • https://www.itv.com/news/2026-06-03/asda-set-to-axe-1000-jobs-as-supermarket-expands-use-of-robots-in-warehouses
  • https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-proteus-robot-europe-investment-employee-support
• A potential bellwether case in generative AI:
  • https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/webcivil/FCASCaseInfo?parm=CaseInfo&index=0ZNmRgvD2qR4l0WOTiUuuQ%3D%3D&county=4C0EZrpMlZxgt4jIwaHpvQ%3D%3D&motion=M&docs=&adate=07/07/2026&civilCaseId=hGKUc3wpVnhmBouCuV5R8w%3D%3D
• The darker side of live shopping, and dark patterns in AI chatbot engagement:
  • https://www.vogue.com/article/the-darker-side-of-live-shopping
  • https://cdt.org/insights/dark-patterns-in-ai-chatbots-a-taxonomy-to-inform-better-design/?ref=404media.co
• Product-level personalisation through pairing AI with print-on-demand:
  • https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/design-merch-with-ai-alexa-for-shopping
  • https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/03/amazon-will-show-ai-product-images-when-you-search-for-some-reason/

The case is strong for someone to own the secondary market, but whether that winds up being first or third-party ownership will depend as much on platforms and standards as it does on business models and incentives.

This week, Ben talks to Muhammad "Mo" Kharodia, CTO of pre-loved childrenswear platform Designer Kids Club, to examine why a founder sees an opportunity to prove out the technology for the secondary market in a narrow tranche first.

Fashion and beauty are surrounded by digital surfaces and physical spaces, and technology has fast become a fixture of how the higher echelons of both industries tell stories and create experiences. But what does the work really look like? And which force - tech or narrative - is in the driving seat?

To find out, Ben talks to Francesco Bernabei, CEO of creative innovation studio Monogrid.

Fashion professionals, particularly in planning-related disciplines, are tasked with making a lot of decisions. The environment those choices live in is still stubbornly Excel, so what does it take to design software to replace spreadsheets - especially when AI is added to the mix?

To get a perspective, Ben talks to Michaela Wessels, CEO and Co-Founder of Style Arcade.

The unit economics of replacing product photography with either wholly-generated or AI-edited images are, from a rational perspective, pretty clear-cut. But with consumer animus against AI content peaking, there’s more to generative images than just the bottom line.

Ben talks to Matthieu Rouif, CEO of Photoroom, about how eCommerce companies and marketplaces are thinking about the gap between the picture and the product.

Despite individual brand efforts, fashion’s footprint has continued to grow. The upshot might not be immediately catastrophic, but a slow set of signals are reinforcing the urgency - and the potential benefits - of near-term action.

Ben talks to Gianluca Belotti, Business Leader at Stahl, and Expert Evaluator for the European Commission, about where sustainability efforts are meeting reality.

Every field that deals in data is figuring out where the boundary sits between analytical models and human judgment. When that data pertains to culture and change, that shifting sweet spot is determined as much by time as it is by technology.

To get a better grasp on what actually goes into the art and the science of forecasting, Ben sits down with Carla Buzasi, CEO of "global change authority" WGSN.