The Fashionista Virtual Dressing Room

Mari Basson

I am a huge shopping fan, and whilst I love buying new clothes, I really don’t enjoy trying them on. So much so ,that sometimes I would rather buy clothes and return them if they don’t fit. Saying it out loud, that doesn’t sound very logical – yet spending hours trying on clothes in the middle of an overcrowded store is a lot less appealing to me.

So imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon Fashionista, a virtual dressing room for the online clothing store Tobi, which hosts a number of top fashion brands including Juicy Couture and Havaianas. But how exactly does it work? Firstly you need to create a user account on Tobi in order to be able to choose the clothes you would like to try on. I was unaware of this at first, and spent hours trying to try on dresses which weren’t really my style.

Once you have filled your shopping basket with the clothes, you can enter the virtual dressing room to try on what you’ve chosen. Thanks to the little tutorial video which the fashionistas kindly uploaded onto the website, you can see that the process looks quite simple:

With my webcam switched on and the marker printed, I attempted to try on the very cute Coralie’s Lantern Print Camisole by Tucker. Probably not the easiest item to try on given the stringy straps, but I liked it so thought I would give it a go.

The biggest problem I encountered was positioning myself correctly in front of the webcam in the three seconds before the site takes you onto the next step, which is getting the webcam to pick up the location of the marker. If you get this location wrong then your clothing item will appear in the wrong place in relation to your body – and that kinda defeats the whole purpose of trying on clothes to see whether they fit or not…

But do try it for yourself, perhaps with a little more practice I would have got it right, but I thought that the virtual dressing room would be more hassle-free than its offline counterpart……. Still it's an awesome Idea and one I hope to see improve!