“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.� - Coco Chanel
The Big Idea Many of our closets thrive on organized chaos. With long working hours and limited time in the morning (coffee takes priority over matching socks) I am really hoping to take the chaos part out of it with Wardrobe Function. When I started to wrap my mind around the idea of a smart closet I kept on hearing the term "wardrobe malfunction." Though the term usually applies to underwear challenged starlets I thought what about Wardrobe Function? Chopping off the MAL part of it left me with the question of how can our closets get organized and how can this be done easily, nearly free and digitally?
Working with ad servers such as DART and Atlas every single day, I couldn't help but notice that clothes and ads have a lot in common: size, dates of use, colors, levels of complexity, and sometimes even malfunction. What if clothes are like ads, the closet an ad sever and ourselves a digital publisher displaying them? And what if it was all manageable and so simple even my grandma would say "DA" to it? I set out to try and concept this idea.
Closet as Ad Server
Clothes and ads have much in common. Just like an ad-serving system is used to organize, track and define ads, a unified system can do the same for clothes. As the closet itself is not digital and building one is too expensive for the average young woman, a simple software can be used for this same process.
Scenario Lisa is getting ready to go out for the night. As she has too many things that piled up in her closet over the years, she decides to use Wardrobe Function to quickly filter through all the items she can potentially wear. She opens the software on her computer and filters by tags that are used to describe her clothes. These also work in a similar way like flickr or posterous tags where you can identify the time of day, value (fancy vs causal) and anything else like color, size and texture. She just bought some new boots which had the ID automatically added to WF with one click button much like twitter. She also has a vintage hat whose tags she entered manually as it has no ID to scan or download. She brought a dress in H&M and used her phone WF app to scan the barcode and add the item to the software. She now has a full outfit picked out with a few simple searches from items already in the software. After the evening she can upload photos from the event and tag them with keywords for WF to sort through and flag like outdated, needs laundering, does not fit and etc.
The Process Lisa uses 3 methods to get data into WF: 1. phone app that scans barcode 2. share/add button at online purchase 3. stores using WF (wardrobe Function) making IDs and tags available 4. manual entry of older/vintage items and lost or missing barcodes and IDs She filters by tags to get the items she needs quickly She can use WF to update data on existing items and add new ones in real time WF can use photos of items as provided by retailers or added by Lisa herself to a fast and effective visual preview
How It Works Just like an ad server will serve a client specific 160x600 sized rich media ad during certain dates at a certain cost (CPM) and to certain publishers... A young woman's outfit worn to an event has an ID, a size, a use date, a brand and even utility that can be trackable and organized using WF as a data provider versatile enough to accept any data feed, update and change in real time.
Sketching the Idea
Sketching Wardrobe Function