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.
Hi Jenny, what’s the scoop?
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.
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.
How does the core Alta app work?