Stitch Fix vs Thread: The AI stylists to help you get dressed in the morning

She's time-pressed, he's poorly dressed. Can the next-gen fashion stylists revamp their A/W wardrobes?
Stitch Fix launched in the UK earlier this year as a mail-ordering personal styling service powered by AI
Stitch Fix

Some are born fashionable, for the rest of us there’s an app. The way we shop for clothes online is rebooting (no, this doesn’t mean buying this season’s thigh-high Louboutins).

This summer ASOS trialled an augmented reality tool, a “virtual catwalk” that beams a human hologram into your bedroom to model clothes for you via your smartphone.

This week Facebook announced an AI experiment, Fashion++, which will suggest small tweaks on how to improve your outfit, from tucking in a shirt to rolling up your sleeves.

Plunging into its mainframe, the AI will use a deep-image neural network to identify clothes and offer alterations, based on a data bank of outfits perceived fashionable by Facebook users.

If fashion 2.0 feels like ceding control to the system, rest assured that the human touch never goes out of style. Stitch Fix and Thread, two mail-order personal styling services, aim to bridge the gap between the haute and the hopeless, each marrying a myriad of data and machine learning with a corporeal stylist’s expert eye.

The former launched in the UK in May, and caters for both men and women; the latter a menswear fashion e-commerce company that last year received a £16.7 million investment from the H&M group.

This smart shortcut to an A/W wardrobe is good news for us — we run wild among the digital clothes rails.

Fix up, look sharp: Sam Fishwick and Katie Strick in their AI-approved outfits
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

Katie wears Stitch Fix

“That’s a … different look,” a colleague laughs as I sport my brand new algorithm-chosen outfit around the office. It turns out my green khaki boilersuit makes me look more like a wannabe artist than any kind of serious hard-hitting journalist. Maybe I shouldn’t have selected “casual” as my office dress code after all.

The AI-driven personal stylist app is thorough with its questioning, opening with basic details such as bra size and hip-width and where you shop, to nitty-gritty preferences like which body parts you like to show off (clearly I must have ticked nothing, judging by the tent-like bell dress that arrived in the post).

There were questions on colours to avoid (brown), denim preference (no holes), how much you normally spend on items (as little as possible?) and how adventurous you want your fix selections to be (a little), plus an “anything else we should know?” box at the end.

Impressively, the algorithm listened: five days later my five-item “fix” landed at my desk, a selection of two tops (v-necks — tick — in blue and green, my chosen colours), a faux-leather miniskirt (adventurous but fun), a floral tiered frock dress (my style, but sadly too big) and a Mango jumpsuit, which fitted perfectly and was delicately described by my workmate as “the opposite of what I’d have picked for you, but cool”. I’ll take that as an insult.

A Stitch Fix "Fix" delivers five curated items to your doorstep for you to try on (Stitch Fix )
Stitch Fix

Each item came with two outfit suggestions, useful for a serial single-garment buyer like me. “Consider dressing it down with trainers (as you mentioned in your profile) and layer up on cooler days with a denim jacket,” suggests Rich, my stylist, on my new Moss CPH dress. “How do you feel about this piece?” he asks about the jumpsuit.

I tell him the truth: apparently the app learns from your feedback and adapts to your preferences more accurately with each fix. The service is said to be perfectly tailored to its client’s individual styling needs by the third try and all shipping and returns are free.

All you pay is a £10 styling fee (redeemable against any items you keep), which is the same as my annual ASOS Premier subscription, plus it saves me the Tube fare (and time trekking to Oxford Street). Third time lucky, then — and in the meantime my colleagues can blame the algorithm, not me.

Samuel wears Thread

I own roughly three types of clothing: plain white £6 T-shirts hastily purchased after coffee spillages; jazzy floral numbers that my dad has reluctantly relinquished; accrued novelty or promotional items — take the Christmas socks I still wear in July. The chance to build a bespoke, styled, and adult look from head-to-toe was too good to pass up.

Picking up my phone and downloading the app was easy. I began with a style questionnaire that runs a little like a matchmaking service. I “hearted” the brands I was familiar with and liked (from Adidas to Zara) and then spent 10 minutes playing Tinder for lewks, tapping options from three sections which I could see myself in: “What do you wear casually?”, “What do you wear to work?” and “What do you wear when you dress up?” Then followed a request for a budget estimate, my sizes and my age.

Thread feeds this into its matrix. The claim that the service is powered by a unique data set of 25 million ratings and 3.7 trillion outfits made me feel confident, albeit a little lost in the crowd.

What has always held me back with online shopping is the fear that what I like online won’t translate to the unboxing — it took the reassuring background presence of Freddie, my IRL stylist (I have no proof he isn’t an algorithm, although was invited into the office to meet him) to haul me through the looking glass. He’d been at Thread for a year and a half and before that in Savile Row at Gieves & Hawkes.

Thread uses a data set of 25 million ratings and 3.7 trillion outfits to determine the right pieces for customers
Thread

If late-adopting men like me need encouragement breaking the glass shopfront of online retail to reinvent their look, Freddie is the answer. Ideas were recommended, I passed on the “quilted, but compact” gilet look proffered (too Dominic Cummings), but Freddie and his AI learned.

And boy, did I glow-up. Drawcord Folk trousers, an Arlen single-breasted overcoat, a Racing Green patterned long-sleeved shirt and Soleset desert boots arrived promptly in neat cardboard packaging with a note from Freddie lauding my good taste. I would never have picked out these items myself. “You look, for the first time, like an actual professional,” offered one colleague.

Mission accomplished.

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