Many of us have dreamed of having a beautiful and organized closet like Cher's in the cult classic movie Clueless. Now, with a little help from a newly revamped app, Millennials can get a little bit more organized when it comes to getting ready in the morning.
Cloth, the revamped iOS app that launched after two years of beta, picks out the perfect outfit based on local weather forecasts and the clothing that is in the user's closet.
"We wanted to make an app that enhances how people are already using their phones and fashion together, without forcing them into unnatural actions that they aren't already doing," says co-founder Seth Porges.
The app can be considered the Instagram for clothes. Users upload a photo of an outfit and tag with relevant categories and weather condition keywords such as winter, summer, work or chilly, and the items are then organized into a virtual closet.
Users of Cloth can then share their closets to friends that appear in an Instagram-like feed and get feedback of the clothes and save favorite "looks" for later.
Another new feature includes a "street style search," where users can browse looks by location, occasion, trends and weather.
"People are spending a lot of time looking at social networks for inspiration," says Porges, who is known for his work at Bloomberg News, Men's Health and Maxim magazine. "You can use tags on Instagram, but when you use Pinterest, you see a lot of product shots, not real people. If I want to see what people are wearing to a wedding in the rain in Paris, I can do that."
The weather features functions by detecting local weather conditions to recommend what users should wear. Using iOS widgets, Cloth also pushes weather notifications to help pick the perfect outfit, while showing thumbnails of the user's best outfits for any temperature.
How practical is the weather feature for the app? The app already has more than 2 million outfit submissions that were racked up from previous testing, but whether or not the weather feature picks out ideal outfits is still up to the user to decide.
Since the app uses real-time weather updates, it could be ideal for picking out an outfit; however, if you don't have a winter jacket in your virtual closet, then the app cannot suggest the item. That means searching for "freezing" will only pull up the warmest clothes in your closet, but the options may limit the creativity of your outfit.
It also appears that users will have to upload a photo of every article of clothing they own to really get the best out of the weather feature, which seems like a burden that most will not want to do.
The All-New Cloth from Kirk Larsen on Vimeo.
[Photo Credit: Cloth]
