LSN : Daily Signals : Foresight Friday: Alison Farrington, foresight content manager

Valentino reimagines the DeVain bag through digital art

Valentino Garavani DeVain digital creative project, Enter De Void

Global – Valentino has introduced a creative showcase dedicated to the brand’s Garavani DeVain bag, extending its ‘fashion is art’ philosophy into new digital territory.

Nine international artists have been commissioned to reinterpret the piece, with the first five – Thomas Albdorf, Enter De Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella and Tina Tona – housed on Valentino’s YouTube channel.

Thomas Albdorf multiplies the DeVain across mirrored planes in studio-shot videos that blur reality and illusion, while Enter De Void uses AI to build a surreal underwater–desert hotel populated by floating fish and bags. Paul Octavious embeds the DeVain into animated digital compositions inspired by 16th-century art. Albert Planella leans into AI’s cinematic potential, rendering the bag as a metamorphic object, and Tina Tona layers collage and animation to create multidimensional, kinetic imagery.

As explored in our Fashion Week dispatch The Download: Fashion Month Spring/Summer 2026, Valentino is one of many fashion brands increasingly drawing on AI, VR and digital craft to extend storytelling.

Strategic opportunity

Consider how you can collaborate with artists to build evolving digital storyworlds around products, turning hero items into cultural touchpoints rather than one-season assets

Foresight Friday: Alison Farrington, foresight content manager

Every Friday, we offer an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about. This week, foresight content manager Alison Farrington reflects on contrasting tech themes from a physical manifestation of AI to sci-fi hive mind and a virtual meeting parody.

: There was no wrong answer for Google’s AI-powered search bar that popped up in Covent Garden, London, last weekend. Billed as ‘officially the longest coffee bar’, the activation was designed to highlight the tech company’s new AI Mode search tool and reward passersby with free coffee for their most complex questions. The phygital presence of search served as a striking visual reminder of how we are asking AI to add layers of conversation and personalisation to our everyday queries. Increasingly, AI-powered search is evolving our curiosity and widening our discovery.

: Meanwhile, the antithesis of AI might just be the alien hive mind featured in the Apple TV show Pluribus. The awkward questions raised by the show’s creator Vince Gilligan, and his concept of a utopia where the world’s entire population is happy and in agreement (wild!), gave me renewed appreciation for uniqueness, divergent thinking and human morality. Pluribus brings our macrotrend The Synthocene Era sharply into focus for its prescient examination of how machine and human intelligence are becoming more intertwined in societal attitudes.

: Timothée Chalamet’s Zoom-meeting parody broke the internet this week. The excruciating 18-minute virtual meeting – in which Chalamet pitches an array of unhinged, out-there ‘promotional ideas’ for his new film, Marty Supreme, to his production company – is a masterclass in post-modern marketing rooted in social, digital culture. Everyone gets the joke because everyone has been on that Zoom call, and it’s Mischief Marketing done right. ‘Schwepp’ has just entered the marketing lexicon, and I’m here for it.

Pluribus, Apple TV, global

Quote of the Week

‘In the era of agentic AI, the CMO role is becoming more and more the role of an orchestrator. Because very soon you will have an array of agents to orchestrate, to perform your day-to-day job’

Francesco Federico, chief marketing officer, S&P Global, speaking at The Drum B2B Festival

Stat: New modelling reveals the human cost of the Trump administration’s approach to climate legislation

Photography by RDNE Stock project, US

Global – New modelling from ProPublica and The Guardian quantifies the human cost of Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ climate agenda. It projects that extra emissions released over the next decade will cause up to 1.3m additional temperature-related deaths worldwide.

Researchers estimate that 5.7bn tonnes of additional carbon could enter the atmosphere by 2035 due to reversals of clean energy incentives, weakened environmental regulations and expanded drilling for fossil fuels. Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris agreement – the international deal struck a decade ago in which countries pledged to work together to limit global warming – during both of his presidencies.

According to research published in Nature, the burden will fall overwhelmingly on poor, hot countries in Africa and south Asia, despite their minimal contribution to emissions. The US, which is responsible for 20% of global greenhouse gases, is expected to experience up to 1% of the resulting temperature-related deaths, while nations such as Niger, Somalia, India and Pakistan face the steepest mortality risks as extreme heat intensifies.

Scientists warn that these estimates capture only direct heat impacts and exclude broader climate-driven crises. Yet the message remains stark: rolling back emissions policy now locks in lethal consequences for decades to come.

Explore our Sustainability topic for further analysis of the climate crisis and responses to the unfolding global emergency.

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