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I love when technology works in a way that meets my particular needs—and that’s the case with this fun new tool I found on Depop, a resale platform I use almost exclusively as a buyer. One inconspicuous little button helps you create a visual representation of an outfit made up of clothing and accessories across various listings.
What is the new Depop tool?
A few days ago, a little scissors icon appeared on all the listings I was browsing, right above the like and bookmark icons I am used to using to save items I want to revisit and possibly purchase. I tapped on it with curiousity and was taken to a page called My Outfits, where I could remove the background from the photo of the listing and add it to a kind of vision board.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say you see a sweater you like while you’re browsing, but you aren’t sure what you’d wear it with. A little while later, you see some jeans you love and start to wonder how they’d look with that sweater. With this new feature, you can add both to your My Outfits tab, where the backgrounds of the listing photos will be removed and you can drag the pieces around on a blank screen, helping yourself visualize how they’d look together before you buy them. Your created outfits stay saved to your account and you can tap them any time to review or change them—plus they link back to the pieces they contain, so when you’re ready to buy, you can just go from there.
I love shopping resale because you can get items that are unique and not everyone is wearing (or you can get the things everyone is wearing for way less money). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an idea for an outfit cobbled together from various listings and tried to visualize it on my own, nor how many times I’ve struck out when the components of the outfit all arrive and I can actually try them on. It happened to me this week, actually: I ordered some pants and a top that I thought would go great together. They did not. Usually, I screenshot each item, then text them to a friend so they line up on top of each other in our iMessage thread. It’s rudimentary, but it gave me a vague sense of how things might look together.
With the new Depop feature, you can make vision boards of outfit ideas and there are no limits. Add shoes, a bag, a hair accessory, a top, a jacket, and pants—even (or especially) if all of those are from different sellers.
A few areas for improvement
A few weeks ago, I reviewed Google’s Doppl app, which is supposed to help you visualize how an article of clothing will look on your body using AI. That app really disappointed me and I wrote at the time that I’d like to see it expanded so I could dress my AI avatar in multiple pieces to get a sense of how they looked together. Right now, Doppl just lets you “try on” one thing and AI-generates the rest of the outfit. Sort of useless! Depop’s new feature wipes the floor with it that way; but it could stand to incorporate some way to borrow the Doppl feature that allows you to dress up a digital version of yourself. I’d like to see not just the outfit, but the outfit on me, with my hair and eye color, etc.
There are some flaws that will be harder to address. The most pressing one is that the photos the My Outfits tool uses are just pictures sellers take. As a seller myself, I’m not always taking high-quality images. Unlike a lot of other sellers, I never use mannequins or studio lighting. If I feel like it, I’ll don the article of clothing and take a mirror selfie, but that’s about as far as I’ll go—and a lot of people are like me. Plenty of sellers snap one or two pics of a dimly-lit pair of jeans or shoes and call it a day. We’re not professionals; we’re regular people trying to get some extra cash. When it comes to My Outfits, that means you may be importing less-than-quality images and trying, based on those, to figure out how an outfit looks. The quality of your My Outfit mockup actually depends on the quality of the photos, and you can’t control that at all.
The other issue is the same one you’ll always run into when online shopping: No matter how many measurements a listing includes, you won’t really know how it fits until you try it on. Arranging a top above a skirt in My Outfits can give you a sense of if the colors go well together (assuming the resellers took their photos in decent lighting), but it can’t tell you how high the skirt will rise on your torso or how low the hem of the shirt will sit. Will you have exposed skin? Will there be an overlap? My Outfits can’t tell you; your body measurements and the measurements of the garments will determine that.
Still, it’s innovative and fun; I’ve been making up outfits all week. I told my friends about it but even after updating their apps, they don’t have the feature yet, so it appears to still be rolling out.
