The Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell is celebrating a birthday. The anime film turns 30 this year. Time flies, especially when you’re the one getting older. Sure, we had the 2017 Hollywood remake with Scarlett Johansson, but I’m strictly interested in the real deal here. Even at thirty years old, the film has stood the test of time. In fact, the story is set in 2029, and it looks like we’re about to start asking ourselves the exact same philosophical questions as the movie did. The big themes are all there: transhumanism, what it means to be human, and of course the "ghost", the soul of AI and robots.

If you’re wrestling with those same questions, you’re definitely not alone. You see creators in media and culture asking the same things. ANREALAGE is a Japanese avant-garde fashion brand founded by Kunihiko Morinaga. The name itself is a mashup of A REAL, UNREAL, and AGE. That tension between the synthetic and the authentic is baked right into the brand’s DNA. At this month’s Paris Fashion Week, ANREALAGE showed their Fall/Winter 2026 collection. The highlight was the LED dresses inspired by Ghost in the Shell. High-tech LED camouflage allowed models to blend into the projections behind them. Tens of thousands of LED lights in a cyberpunk aesthetic showed scenes from the movie, blurring the line between man and machine. Not by making machines look like people, but by blending people into the machines. Just like in the film, where the human soul forms the ghost within the robot, until the Puppet Master appears: a virus that develops a soul of its own. ANREALAGE isn’t the first to play with this, either. Louis Vuitton was exploring these themes back in 2017. What does it even mean to exist anymore?

With all that in the back of my mind, I heard my colleague Leni Hakvoort talk about moments of interaction in retail. We’re standing at the dawn of agentic commerce, where plenty of customer interactions will be replaced by agents. These agents will be faster, more efficient, and simply better at certain tasks than humans. But we are still a long way from finding the "ghost" in these agent-to-human interactions. The uncanny valley in retail. For brand experience, people will keep searching for genuine human-to-human connection. As a retailer, you need to think about how to bring the human closer to the machine and the machine closer to the human in a way that makes the interaction feel real. Customers will always look for a soul in retail.