Jisu Jang
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) creates a central paradox for luxury fashion. It can expand creative possibility, accelerate ideation, and enable new forms of personalization, yet it may also make luxury objects appear reproducible, weakly authored, or detached from the human judgment on which luxury aura depends. This dissertation examines when AI involvement threatens luxury aura and when aura can be reconstructed through the way AI-enabled luxury is created and presented. Across two essays and seven experiments, the dissertation develops a configuration-dependent account of AI-era aura. Essay 1 examines creation collaboration configuration: how human, AI, consumer, and authorization roles are arranged in the design process. The findings show that AI as a collaboration partner can reduce purchase intention by increasing perceived reproducibility and weakening perceived integrity. However, AI involvement is not uniformly damaging. Consumer inclusion can reconstruct aura by increasing perceived meaningfulness, and designer authorization can reconstruct aura by strengthening perceived integrity and perceived meaningfulness. Essay 2 examines presentation nexus configuration: how the main luxury collection is arranged with artwork, display contexts, and technological anchors at the point of consumer encounter. The findings show that presentation elements increase aura when they make perceived creative intentionality inferable, especially when artwork is aligned with the collection or when technological anchors are materially integrated rather than merely present. Theoretically, the dissertation shifts consumer AI and luxury research from a human-versus-AI source question to a configuration-based account of how agency, meaning, authority, and presentation sustain aura. Managerially, the findings suggest that luxury brands should use AI only when creation and presentation structures make human judgment, symbolic meaning, and creative intentionality visible to consumers.