Photo: Courtesy of Jenny Wang Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Welcome to the Scoop : a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.
This week’s guest is Jenny Wang, founder of Alta, which is essentially one of the few apps that seem to be succeeding in bringing that mythical Clueless closet to life .
Jenny founded Alta in 2023 and launched it last summer , after raising over $11 million from investors including the Arnault family’s Aglaé Ventures, Karlie Kloss and DoorDash CEO Tony Xu. In the year since, Alta has worked on a number of partnerships, the most recent of which we are speaking about today.
We are partnering with Rent the Runway (RTR), and we will be rolling out the functionality over the next couple of weeks. When you go to any product page on RTR, there will be both avatars and outfits for different occasions, generated by Alta. The partnership essentially brings an AI-driven styling experience to any item on RTR so their customers can discover endless ways to style items and outfits, and it also makes it easy to find other items to complete the look. It’s very cutting-edge technology, and it uses AI avatars.
Jenny Wang looking at the Marimekko page live on the RTR website, with outfits generated by Alta.
So it’s using generic avatars, not digital twins?
Not yet. We made six different generic avatars with RTR, and they range from size 2 to 12.
There is some criticism around the use of generic avatars instead of real people in e-commerce because they threaten jobs within a retailer’s photo studio . What is your position?
This is just the first iteration of the product, and we created the avatar experience in response to customer demand. Throughout this whole process, we’ve been interviewing RTR customers about their preferences, and from what we’re hearing, the desire to envision an outfit on an avatar is real. She is asking for variety, and she is asking to better imagine how these outfit suggestions might work for her. So we are answering that with size diversity, and by investing in a quantity of outfits that is far greater than what RTR could ever shoot, and providing additive content to the existing e-commerce photography experience on the RTR website and app.
We generate around one user avatar every second on the app. It’s real people around the world creating their avatars, and they also upload the contents of their closet. We also have a daily leaderboard of the most popular outfits on the app. People submit their outfits for other users to try on, and whoever gets the most tries sits at the top. It’s really cute.
Have you seen any major summer trends like Brazilcore or latex come through the app?
There have been so many Brazilcore outfits recently. Or this morning, for instance, I woke up and went on the app and saw so many users trying on different versions of the latest Zendaya outfit from the Odyssey press tour.
I remember when The Devil Wears Prada 2 came out, people were posting a lot of Prada outfits as well as one specific outfit worn by Emily Blunt, the one with the Dior shirt.
Alta is essentially a social media app, right? Is this where social media is going?
I think your avatar is your AI-era selfie. The last decade was so much about the mirror selfie as a form of self-expression. And users o…