Zalando Shutters Berlin Studios as Fashion Photography Goes Synthetic

Zalando, Europe's largest online fashion retailer, has closed both of its Berlin photo studios, cutting 340 jobs, as major brands replace human photography with generative AI, according to a Reuters investigation.

The closures are not an outlier. They are the sharpest evidence yet that commercial fashion photography, an industry built on studios, crews, and human models, is being dismantled from the inside. Reuters reviewed dozens of confidential photo shoot contracts from brands including Calvin Klein, Diesel, and L'Oreal. The documents grant permission to reuse a model's likeness repeatedly, for any purpose — or to keep the body and swap the head with AI editing tools.

Some companies have cut humans out of the pipeline entirely. They no longer photograph anyone at all. Instead, they use fully synthetic models.

What does this change for the people involved?

livelihoods, first. Beyond Zalando's 340 lost positions — the company says some staff transferred to other roles — the German brand About You has launched Scayle Studios, a digital imagery studio that relies on AI-generated models. It claims the operation cuts production costs by 90 percent.

"We are saving so much money," Julian Jansen, vice president of marketing at About You, told Reuters. "You've always had this super fast world of ecommerce, and this super slow traditional world of photo shoots, it didn't fit together in any way — and now with AI, it's a completely different scale."

That quote is the whole story in one breath. E-commerce moves at machine speed. Traditional shoots do not. Brands have chosen which of the two survives.

What are models being asked to sign?

The contracts Reuters examined show how the rights to a human face are being quietly acquired. A draft contract from Calvin Klein states the fashion house "may use reasonably unrecognizable images of Model (no identifying features such as Model's face, scars, tattoos or otherwise) to train and fine tune AI tools for learning general model attributes." There is no extra pay for this.

Diesel went further on a casting sheet. Models were asked to agree to:

• "alteration or reconstruction of facial features and body proportions"
• "swapping of faces among the participating models"
• "superimposition of the Participant's face onto another person's body"

Diesel told Reuters the release covered one specific campaign only and does not represent a typical contract. Reale Actives, another brand named in the report, similarly sought rights to create digital clones of models. The company — whose tagline is "Reale you is perfect you" — denied ever using AI to replicate a model.

Where does this leave commercial photography?

Models still being hired face a shrinking menu of options. Sign away the face, or don't work. Some have already been replaced outright by AI-generated alternatives. Others have had their likeness replicated without any compensation at all.

The economics are brutal and simple. If Scayle Studios can deliver imagery at a tenth of previous cost, and Zalando can run a catalog without a single studio in Berlin, the pressure on every mid-sized commercial operation is immediate. Crews, retouchers, studio rentals, and the photographers themselves sit in the same path.

What does this change for photography as a craft? For now, the damage is concentrated in catalog and e-commerce work — the volume end of the market. Editorial, luxury campaign, and art photography have not yet been replaced at scale. But the training data now being harvested through these contracts suggests brands are building toward a wider substitution, one signed release at a time, and the next round of contract negotiations will show whether models and photographers can claw back any control over their own images.