What is effort signalling? The anti-AI trend taking over luxury fashion

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The distinctive sound of pencil scratching against paper is increasingly unusual in the world of fashion imagery, yet this half-forgotten sound opens Prada’s 2026 holiday…

The distinctive sound of pencil scratching against paper is increasingly unusual in the world of fashion imagery, yet this half-forgotten sound opens Prada’s 2026 holiday campaign. Across a series of films for the Italian luxury house, woodland creatures, snow-covered landscapes and fantastical characters all come to life through the painstaking art of hand-drawn animation.

For the project, the Italian house tapped veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy, whose credits include The Land Before Time and Thumbelina. With each individual frame drawn by hand, the resulting illustrations are woven into live-action scenes featuring actors including Maya Hawke, Sadie Sink and Kelvin Harrison Jr. Shot by photographer Glen Luchford, the campaign creates a winter fantasy that feels deliberately, enchantingly nostalgic.

“I learnt my craft with pencil and paper, old-school analogue drawing with pencil and paper,” says Pomeroy in the teaser video. For him, the decision to work by hand goes beyond sketching. “There’s a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that’s to see that there’s value in the human touch.”

It is a sentiment finding an increasingly receptive audience. As generative artificial intelligence increasingly conjures elaborate visual worlds in seconds, luxury brands are discovering that the narrative of the time, skill and labour behind a creation is as compelling as the finished result. The phenomenon has even acquired a name: effort signalling, or, in its more emphatic incarnation, effort maxxing.

It describes the deliberate display of human input and creative labour as a marker of authenticity and value. In a digital landscape crowded with synthetic imagery and what has become known as AI slop, the singular finesse of a human hand is emerging as a way for luxury houses to distinguish themselves.

Loewe took this labour-intensive approach to mark its 180th anniversary this year, commissioning illustrator Joanna Blemont and a team of artists to…

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