Vogue Ukraine: John Imah on AI, Personal Taste and the Future of Shopping

Vogue Ukraine’s English-language feature, The End of the Guessing Game: How AI Is Reinventing the Way We Shop, explores John Imah’s vision for SPREEAI through the uncertainty familiar to online shoppers. A garment can look appealing on a screen while leaving questions about its fit, proportions and place in someone’s wardrobe.

The feature connects that problem with Imah’s approach to personalization. It discusses virtual try-on, the relationship between digital and physical retail, and the importance of respecting personal taste. It also considers the potential implications of better shopping decisions for retailers and returns. These are presented through the interview’s account of the company and its ambitions, rather than as a guarantee of any individual shopper’s results.

This coverage has a different emphasis from Imah’s Vogue Portugal interview, which looks more closely at heritage, garment construction and personal style. Here, the central subject is the experience of choosing clothes.

What makes a recommendation useful?

A helpful recommendation needs more than a plausible match. It needs to make sense to the person receiving it. Someone might like an item’s color but dislike its proportions, admire an outfit without wanting to wear it, or want something entirely different for a particular occasion. Those distinctions are part of an ordinary shopping decision.

This is why personalization is worth evaluating through the choices it makes possible. Can a shopper compare alternatives? Can they understand why something has been suggested? Can they move beyond an earlier preference without having to fight the interface? The quality of the experience depends partly on how easily people can change their minds.

There is also a difference between helping someone picture an option and deciding what they should choose. A useful digital experience can make a possibility easier to understand while leaving the final decision with the shopper. That distinction provides a practical lens for reading the interview’s discussion of taste and technology.

The same person, different shopping moments

Browsing at home and walking into a store involve different kinds of information. A screen can make comparison convenient. A store offers touch, movement, conversation and the chance to experience a garment directly. A customer may want both, at different points in the same decision.

The design challenge is therefore broader than reproducing a fitting room on a phone. It includes deciding which questions belong in a digital interaction and which are better answered through physical experience or human service. Looking at the entire journey helps readers assess where a tool might be useful without assuming it needs to replace every other part of shopping.

A related perspective from John Imah

In Why Fashion Is the Most Interesting Problem in AI, Imah explains why identity and self-expression are central to his interest in this field. The essay offers his own account of the cultural and emotional dimensions that make clothing different from an interchangeable product.

Read that essay alongside the complete Vogue Ukraine feature for two complementary perspectives: a publication’s account of the shopping experience SPREEAI aims to improve, and the founder’s explanation of why the human dimensions of fashion matter to the work.