Fashion: Closing the Gap between Online and High Street Shopping
Research tells us that there as a fantastic loyalty to brands in the fashion industry. And the look, image, familiar identifiers and the feel or “sense” of brands can be conveyed very successfully on the Internet. So far so good. But online fashion shopping has its limitations. That pair of designer jeans looks good in the photo, but is the colour accurate, is the denim material hard or soft, and more importantly, will they fit me and/or look good on me? No-one wants to part with money, only to find upon delivery that the item is not what you thought you saw, or is ill-fitting- leaving you with all the fuss and bother of returning it to get a refund. Half of people buy their PC and computer-related products on-line, and two-thirds of all book purchases are made on-line. Fashion and clothing? Less than 10% are bought online. But things may be changing.
In order to entice people away from the High Street and shop online for their fashion, more progressive companies are overhauling their internet pages and adding some new and innovative tweaks and twists.
was one of the first companies to experiment with virtual models whereby potential customers can create a virtual model based on their statistics, and then virtually try on clothes. <a href=”http://www.landsend.com/”>Lands End Clothing</a> Ten years on from that Lands’ End initiative, the engine programme used- My Virtual Model (MVM)- has been developed and improved, and can be found on a lot of fashion sites these days. http://www.mvm.com/index.html
It can provide 360 degree views of many items on your virtual model. The MVM site itself does let you customize a model of yourself and play around a bit with some clothing items in their community site:

Any company wanting to make use of the MVM programme would need to scan in their products, and with regular new season launches, this would have to be effected on a regular basis. But only last month (October) OneStopPlus, that caters for plus size women and big or tall men launched a more technologically advanced virtual model from MVM. It provides 30,000 outfit combinations from OneStopPlus’ collection. The avatar can be personalised to resemble the customer’s eye, skin and hair colour.

Another company, Fits.Me http://fits.me/ has developed robot mannequins that can be customised by the shopper to match their body measurements, before they try on fashion items.

Other sites use technologies that enable online shoppers to get up close and personal with the product they are thinking of buying. In this way they can get they can get a feel for fabrics, collars and other product attributes by getting a much closer look.
The online fashion industry has not yet found an affordable virtual model application which will transform internet sales dramtically. 3D films offer a good fun visual experience in three dimensions, but they are not close to reality and full use of all five sense. At the moment, while online virtual models can give you a good impression of what certain clothes will look like on you, we await a killer application or a breakthrough development in this area, to gain the trust of people to purchase fashion online with confidence.