Conde Nast staged the fifth edition of Vogue World at Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II on September 23, 2026, opening Milan Fashion Week with a show that mixed haute couture, celebrities and humanoid robots. The evening was framed as a tribute to Italian craftsmanship and the human touch behind luxury, staged beneath the glass dome of the city’s grandest shopping arcade, which was turned into an open-air theatre lined with design houses and film stars.
A segment titled “The Age of Intelligence” sent robots made by the Chinese firm Unitree down the runway, backed by sponsors that included the technology companies Meta and OpenAI. The machines carried accessories and struck poses in a sequence meant to nod to fashion’s uneasy embrace of artificial intelligence. They drew mockery online, and a widely shared clip appeared to show the designer Alessandro Michele grimacing as the robots danced to music.
“Publications are figuring out new ways to make money and tech has money. Vogue has the cultural influence and access that those tech people want,” said Jason Johnson, founder of the Culture Impact Agency, summing up the logic behind the partnerships.
Vogue World, first held in New York in 2022, has grown into a traveling live-events franchise that Conde Nast uses to extend the Vogue name beyond the printed page. Earlier editions in London and Paris raised money for cultural causes while showcasing local designers and drawing crowds of celebrities. Each stop pulls in fashion houses and, increasingly, technology companies as backers, turning the magazine’s cachet into a stage that sponsors pay to share.
As magazine advertising keeps shrinking, publishers lean ever harder on ticketed spectacle and corporate partnerships to fund their titles. The backlash over the robots showed the risk in that strategy, as a night meant to honor artisanal skill was overshadowed by the very machines built to upstage it. For a title that helped define twentieth-century glamour, it underlined the tension between prestige and the commercial pressures now shaping media. The night is likely to shape how other publishers approach live events and sponsorship deals of their own in the years ahead.
