Channel details verified as of publication date. General information, not legal advice.
Everything else in the transparency rules happens inside the file, out of sight. The visible label is the one duty performed in public, on the image, by the brand that publishes it, and it is the half of the system that no platform can do for you. It is also, mechanically, the easiest duty in the whole framework: the icons are free, the placement rules are learnable in ten minutes, and the workflow change is one preset. This is the ten minutes.
Which images need it: thirty-second recap
The label applies to deepfake-class content, and in fashion that means, above all: photorealistic synthetic models wearing products, virtual try-on applied to photos of real people, and renders that improve the product beyond reality. AI backgrounds behind real products and pure retouching do not trigger it. Check the full five-type classification, with the boundary cases; this post assumes you know which of your images are in scope and covers how to label them properly.
What counts as a valid label
The legal standard has three working parts: the disclosure must be clear, it must be distinguishable from the surrounding content, and it must be perceivable at the first interaction, meaning a person encountering the image learns it is AI-generated without expanding anything, clicking anything or scrolling for it.
The European Commission publishes official icons built to meet that standard: free to use, no attribution required, available in three versions for different contexts, designed to auto-contrast against light and dark backgrounds. Two rules of use matter: the icon is used unmodified, not redrawn to match your brand palette, and it sits where the standard puts it, not where the layout would prefer it. A brand may use its own equivalent marking instead, but "equivalent" is measured against the same three-part standard, and the official icons are the option no authority will ever argue with. Download them from the Commission's page.
Channel by channel
| Channel | What to do | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Own e-commerce site | Icon on the image or immediately adjacent to it, visible in the product gallery view, not only on a zoomed or detail view. | A disclosure that exists only on a linked "about our imagery" page fails first-interaction. The label travels with the image, everywhere the image renders, thumbnails included where feasible. |
| Instagram / Facebook | Label in the image itself (baked or overlaid), plus the platform's AI disclosure toggle where offered. | The caption is below the image and often truncated: a caption-only disclosure is a weak position. Platform toggles help but are not under your control (see next section). |
| TikTok / video platforms | Visible label present on the content; for video, present in a way a viewer encounters at first interaction, not only in the description. | Auto-play means viewers meet frames, not captions. A label that appears only in the final second was never perceived at first interaction. |
| Marketplaces (Amazon, Zalando...) | Follow the marketplace's synthetic-content policy AND carry your own label; marketplace policies are additional rules, not substitutes for the legal duty. | Some marketplaces restrict overlays on product images. Where an on-image icon conflicts with listing rules, place the disclosure at the closest permitted point to the image and document the constraint. |
| Print / OOH / lookbooks | Icon printed with the image, legible at the medium's normal viewing distance. | Print has no caption to hide behind and no toggle to lean on: the label is on the artwork or it is nowhere. |
| Email marketing | Label on the image as rendered in the email body. | Alt text is not a visible label: it renders only when the image does not. |
Do platform AI labels satisfy your duty?
Instagram, TikTok and others increasingly attach their own AI labels, sometimes from your toggle, sometimes automatically from detected marks. Use these features: they add clarity and they signal good faith. But build on the cautious reading: the duty is yours, the platform's label is not under your control, its wording and visibility change without notice, and it does not follow the image when the file travels beyond the platform. The position that survives scrutiny is a label you control, on or immediately adjacent to the image, with the platform's toggle as reinforcement rather than as the plan.
The five ways labels fail
- 1. The below-the-fold caption: "Image created with AI" as line four of a truncated caption was never perceivable at first interaction.
- 2. The hashtag: #AIgenerated in a tag cloud is metadata for the algorithm, not disclosure for a person.
- 3. The redesigned icon: recolouring the official icon into your palette until it reads as a brand flourish defeats "distinguishable", the one property the icon exists to have.
- 4. The landing-page label: labelled on your site, unlabelled in the ad that leads there. The duty attaches to each publication of the image, not to the destination.
- 5. The alt-text disclosure: accessible text is excellent practice and invisible to the sighted majority. It supplements a visible label; it cannot be one.
Making it a workflow, not a task
The reason labelling fails in practice is rarely disagreement; it is that the duty lives in nobody's checklist. The fix is mechanical: a labelling preset per channel (icon version, position, size) applied at export or by the publishing tool; the deepfake-class flag carried on the asset from creation so the preset fires automatically; and one QA line in the publishing checklist, "in-scope image, label present, first-interaction visible". Our compliance page includes the label tooling and placement presets we built for exactly this, and the vendor conversation about who applies which preset belongs in the ten questions.
The wider legal picture, including why the platform's invisible marks were never going to cover this duty, is in the Article 50 guide.
Every image exported from Modelia carries signed provenance and an invisible watermark by default, and anyone can check any image, free, no account, in our public C2PA checker. The full picture, rules and industry data, is in The State of AI-Generated Content in Fashion 2026.
