When I heard about Doppl last week, I was intrigued. A new offering from Google Labs, it's available on iOS and Android and promises to let "you try on any look and explore your style." From what I gathered early on, it uses AI to superimpose clothing onto existing photos of you. It reminded me of the famous scene in Clueless where Cher picks out her outfit for the day using software that places images of pieces of her wardrobe over a mockup of her body. Like pretty much every woman I know, I grew up deeply covetous of that fictional technology and always wanted access to something similar. In fact, I've gone the DIY route by making a personal outfit catalogue in the notes app on my phone. I assumed Doppl would be much better and more advanced than that, but I was wrong. It's a cool idea that has the potential to be helpful, but it's not there yet.
Creating a Doppl is difficult
Your in-app avatar is called your Doppl. The app encourages you to upload a full-body photo taken in bright light with no hat and a natural pose. As soon as I downloaded the app last Friday—immediately upon learning it existed, mind you—I set about trying to do that, but all of my photos got rejected, one after the other. My camera roll is flush with well-lit, full-body shots of me—I love fashion, I love social media, and I eventually sell all my clothes, using photos of myself wearing them in the listings. This shouldn't have been as hard as it was. Ultimately, a random mirror selfie from the gym was accepted by the app and I got to work.
Since then, I've tried creating more Doppls. You're allowed to have a collection of them in there so you can see how the clothes you like would look in different poses and settings. Only two more, a picture of me in a swimsuit on a boat with a stupid look on my face and a photo of me in the corner of a restaurant, were accepted. I've tried to create maybe 20 Doppls; only three have been accepted. I didn't get any feedback, like, "try standing closer" or "try to find better lighting." There was no explanation for the rejection.
It works ... most of the time
Last Friday, I tried over and over to get Doppl to perform its only function, which was to show me how I'd look in an outfit I found online. I screenshotted a Zimmermann dress I thought was pretty, tapped the + button in the bottom menu, and hit the button that says TRY A LOOK. I would be taken to a loading screen, but nothing ever loaded. All morning, I tried repeatedly. Sometimes, the app bugged out and force-closed. Other times, it stayed on that loading screen forever. I gave it some grace; it had just been released and was probably a little buggy.
It finally worked last night. After about 10 seconds of the loading screen, Doppl presented me a mockup of how I'd look in the Zimmermann dress. Most impressively, the AI had recognized that the dress had lantern sleeves that tighten at the wrist and had replicated how those might look in the pose shown in my avatar, with my hand up to hold my phone while I snapped a mirror selfie.
I tried again with some Agolde shorts and got a sloppy, ill-fitting mess. Yes, it showed me how they'd look on me broadly, but it wasn't any better than using my imagination. In fact, it was kind of worse.
The app also randomly generated some pictures of me wearing pink skinny jeans, which was very 2009 of it, but not very interesting to me, as it's not 2009.
Animations don't work
Once your Doppl is dressed in the outfit you've selected from a screenshot, you allegedly have the option to "animate" it to "see how an outfit might look in motion." I tried this with the Zimmermann dress, the Agolde shorts, and the weird picture of me in pink pants. It did not work at all. There was no animation or movement. I assume this will be worked out in future updates, but it was a little disappointing.
Fit is all over the place
I buy and sell clothes constantly and I know that there are many elements that determine if a piece of clothing is right for someone. I'm very particular about waist size, for instance, preferring to see it represented in inches rather than a size like "XS" or "23." Because I'm exactly five feet tall, I'm also always worried about inseams—getting pants hemmed is not only expensive, it also reduces an item's resale value and makes them look funny on me. If the part of the pants designed to hit at a taller woman's calf is hemmed and hitting at my ankle, it looks ridiculous, stiff, and floppy.
Doppl doesn't care about all that. At no point did I have to enter in my sizes, nor did I have to input the sizes of the screenshotted garments I was forcing it to superimpose on my body. I'm quite positive that both the dress and the shorts would not hit at the part of the leg Doppl guessed they would if I were to actually order them and try them on in real life.
Here's what I'd like to see in the future
It's fun to play a little virtual dress-up, but this really has no purpose at the moment. I don't think the mockups Doppl produced are fully representative of how I'd look in any of the garments I selected and, even if they were, I could imagine that myself.
What would really make this app useful is if it were more like that software in Clueless. I don't need to see rough, estimated, AI-generated ideas of how I might look in a dress from a screenshot, but I'd use this all the time if I could see how I'd look in my own clothes, in real outfits. As it stands, there's no way to ask it to show you how you'd look in a particular top, bottoms, jacket, and shoes. It can only show you one of those things and then it uses generative AI for the rest. Doppl showed me how I might look in those denim shorts, but it also basically hallucinated a black t-shirt and white sneakers for me to wear with them. Those aren't my style at all, so the overall image wasn't helpful. If I could ask it to show me how the shorts might look with a certain top, bag, and sandals, it would be wildly useful. Every night, I try on outfit combos for the next day, yanking components off my shelves and hangers, making a huge mess, and having to spend time pulling things on and off, then cleaning everything up. With some tweaks, the app could do that work for me.
Beyond hoping the animation feature works at some point, I'd also like it to be more personalized. One single full-body picture of me alone doesn't reveal my sizes or how things tend to fit on me. I'd like to be able to input all my measurements and style preferences, plus any measurement details I know about the items I'm asking it to envision me in. Finally, there should be somewhere to keep notes. I tried a gorgeous House of CB dress and the app really outdid itself by making my AI doppelganger look like she was flipping the skirt, model-style. I'd love the option to add notes to that picture, like a link to the dress or ideas about when and where I could wear something like it. Being able to tag the mockups with searchable words like "work," "club," or "birthday party" would be nice.
There is a lot of potential here for Doppl to be a useful styling tool, but right now, it's just a half-hearted version of paper dolls. I'm excited to see what, if anything, new updates to the app bring, so I'm not going to delete it. If and when it improves, I'll let you know.
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