Between 20 and 40 percent of everything bought online gets returned. For clothing, half of those returns are fit-related. Not wrong color. Not changed mind. The medium was not a medium.
Half of online shoppers now buy multiple sizes expecting to return the rest. The industry calls this “bracketing” — as if naming a failure makes it a feature.
Three of the largest tech and retail companies have each spent years building their version of virtual try-on. They built three fundamentally different things.
Here is what the fashion industry would like you to believe: that style requires constant reinvention. That creativity expresses itself through variety. That wearing the same thing twice is — at best — a concession to convenience, and at worst, a signal that you have given up.
Here is what is actually true: the personal uniform is the logical endpoint of developing taste.
Fran Lebowitz at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. The blazer, the white shirt, the attitude — unchanged since 1978.Photo: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0.
Fran Lebowitz has worn essentially the same outfit since 1978. Georgia O’Keeffe wore black and white into her nineties. Carolina Herrera has worn a crisp white shirt for more than forty years. Rei Kawakubo, who studied ethics before she made clothes, has never stopped dressing in black.
