I Let an App Dress Me and Here's What Happened

By: Megan Jurnak

Like many other college students, I also have a demanding job and several other commitments outside of class – not to mention a social life to try and maintain! Still, I love my clothes and spend a lot of time (that I don’t have) picking out my outfits for the day. But – apparently – there’s now an app for that!

Meet Pureple – an app making the rounds on the internet that’s supposed to let you categorize the clothes in your closet AND can select your outfits for you. After seeing a few attempts by professionals to make use of that second feature, I decided to see if it would be any help to a busy student like myself.

The first step in setting up the app (and the biggest challenge) is taking pictures of all your clothes. According to the app, most users have “an average of 60 items in their closet”. My physical closet definitely has more than 60 items, but, for the sake of time, I decided to shoot for the average. That proved to be a bit more difficult than I imagined.

Taking the pictures was a weird experience. The app suggests that you should use a “solid, contrasting background”. Since my apartment has very little open wall space (my first background thought), I ended up using my carpet, which led to a lot of stretching out on the floor positioning clothes and seeing said clothes covered with carpet lint.

During this process, I quickly discovered some things that were a little off about the app. There’s a “background removal” function that is supposed to clean up your photos but ends up wildly distorting them instead. Also, the interface isn’t super intuitive, and it crashed a couple times, mid-photo. All of this made me super apprehensive (no pun intended). But, I didn’t come here to judge the technical parts of Pureple, so let’s move on to its outfits.

Outfit 1

My rating: 6.5/10

Insta rating: 9/10

After all my technical hangups with Pureple, I was blown away by the fact that this first outfit wasn’t the worst. First of all, everything matched. It was also pretty appropriate for the weird, rainy weather. The only thing that was a little strange about it to me was the pants. They were just barely too short for the boots, which left me with some cold calves and made it look like they were too small, plus I had to keep hiking them up to act as high waisted pants with the cropped sweater. As my friend Lana put it, “I’d like you to change your pants to jeans. Then, I’d love it.” Overall, it was a good outfit that was just enough out of my comfort zone to make things interesting.

My rating: 2/10

Insta rating: 7/10

Speaking of outside of my comfort zone, leggings and a crop top is *never* something I would pick out for myself. And, throughout the day, I was reminded as to why exactly that is. I tried to hide as much of myself behind the giant winter coat for as much of the day as possible. The self-consciousness built throughout the day, which most likely contributed to the fact that no one who actually saw me in person on Wednesday gave the outfit a positive rating on the Insta poll. As for the positive reviews, what can I say? I take a good iPhone timer selfie.

My rating: 9/10

Insta rating: 9.9/10

This outfit confirms my theory that a nice dress can look good under any circumstances. I will say, I don’t know how I never thought to wear these shoes with this dress! They matched perfectly, and I ended up being a huge fan of this outfit. I felt confident and professional wiht just a touch of sass. The only thing I wasn’t crazy about was the fact that I was freezing my calves off all day. Pro tip for anyone looking to employ Pureple in their daily routine: create a separate category for “light jackets”, or take the extra time to categorize things by season so that the snack you end up looking like isn’t a popsicle.

My rating: 5/10

Insta rating: 5/10

I spent the whole day alternating between loving and hating this outfit. It performed the worst on Instagram, but was definitely not the worst in my heart. My friend from back home said, “This app tries to hard to be trendy”. Instead, I think *I* try to hard to be trendy when I buy clothes, and this app just didn’t let me apply the internal filter that doesn’t let me leave the house looking like a deeply discounted Forever 21 model. The hat also fell off my head no less than six times. Floppy hat + windy days is almost as bad as crop top + leggings.

Verdict

Pureple is an experience. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, as the set up is grueling and the outfit choices can be pretty random at times. However, if you’re someone with a more neutral closet (or only input your basics), you could end up saving yourself some time by picking out clothes without having to get out of bed (a major plus this week). The biggest benefit to the app as a whole is that it lets you look at your closet and clothes combinations in ways you might never have thought of before. (Bought that shirt to go with those pants? It might look great with that skirt too!) Overall, Pureple is an exciting experience and puts you one step closer to the Clueless closet of your dreams.