Anyone who has ever bought something on Depop knows the specific leap of faith involved. You find the perfect vintage Carhartt jacket or the exact slip dress you’ve been hunting for months, photographed in a stranger’s bedroom against a radiator and a half-closed Ikea wardrobe, and you have to extrapolate from one grainy image whether it’ll look like a dream or a regrettable £40 on you. Resale fashion runs on imagination, optimism and a generous returns-free gamble. Until, perhaps, now.
DRESSX – the virtual fashion company best known for AI-powered try-on – is partnering with Depop to drag that gamble into the future. The pair are bringing the DRESSX AI Mirror to Governors Ball in New York on 5 June, the first stop in what’s billed as a wider roadshow of live events. Festival-goers can step up to the mirror and try on a curated collection of 300 outfits sourced from real Depop sellers, no changing room, no awkward over-the-jeans layering, no removing your actual coat required.
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The genius is in the framing. Virtual try-on, as a technology, has spent years being polite and corporate – built around glossy brand catalogues and studio-shot product imagery, the kind of pristine flat-lays and ghost-mannequin shots that big retailers can afford to commission. DRESSX is, in effect, taking that same technology and pointing it at the chaotic, joyful, wildly inconsistent world of user-generated resale content. That’s a meaningfully harder problem, and it’s also the entire point.
At the activation, guests can browse the 300 looks filtered by aesthetic – Western, Y2K, Streetwear and Minimalism, which between them cover roughly 90% of any millennial woman’s mood board – and then mix and match in real time. Tops, bottoms, shoes, bags, belts and accessories can be swapped and restyled until the look is exactly right. Once you land on the combination that makes you feel like the main character, you take your photo, and DRESSX sends it straight to your phone via email or text, complete with direct links to shop every individual piece on Depop. From try-on to checkout, as the campaign puts it, without losing the look you fell in love with.
If you’ve ever assembled a flawless outfit in your head from twelve different open tabs and then lost the thread entirely by the time you went to actually buy anything, you’ll understand why that last bit matters. The gap between inspiration and purchase is where most fashion fantasies die. Closing it – turning a styled, photographed, head-to-toe look into a tappable shopping list – is the unglamorous logistics that make the magic usable.
The co-founders are clear that this is about expanding what virtual try-on is allowed to be. “We are excited to partner with Depop to bring virtual try-on into a completely new context: resale fashion, seller creativity and live event discovery,” say Daria Shapovalova and Natalia Modenova, Co-founders at DRESSX.
They continue: “What makes this experience especially exciting is that it transforms Depop seller content into an interactive styling journey, where users can experiment with full looks in real time, including clothing, shoes, bags, belts and accessories. For us, this is an important step in showing how AI powered try-on can make fashion content more interactive, discoverable and engaging far beyond traditional e-commerce environments.”
The technical brag underneath the launch is worth understanding, because it’s the bit that signals where this is all heading. “It also demonstrates that this technology is not limited to new luxury fashion or studio shot product catalogues, but can work equally powerfully within resale fashion and community-driven platforms so popular with Gen Z audiences,” the founders say. “Making virtual try-on work with seller-generated and UGC style fashion content is technically far more challenging than traditional e-commerce imagery, which makes this partnership especially exciting for us. It opens up entirely new possibilities for how pre-loved fashion can be experienced digitally.”
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Translated out of founder-speak: if you can make an AI mirror work with a wonky photo snapped on a seller’s phone, you can make it work with almost anything. And that has real implications for how secondhand shopping scales. Depop’s whole appeal is its sprawling, human, un-corporate inventory – every item one-of-one, every listing a little different. The thing that makes it charming is also what makes it hard to standardise into a slick try-on experience. Cracking that is genuinely clever.
A note of realism, because The Modems doesn’t do uncritical hype. Virtual try-on still lives or dies on whether the result actually looks like you rather than a glossy approximation of you, and a festival activation is a controlled, best-case showcase – not proof it’ll feel as seamless in your kitchen at midnight. There’s also the ever-present tension of any frictionless shopping tool: making pre-loved fashion this instantly buyable could nudge resale, supposedly the sustainable option, straight back into impulse-purchase territory.
But the direction is the right one. Secondhand is how a huge share of young women already shop – for the prices, the planet and the thrill of the find – and giving that behaviour the same polished tech that luxury brands have hoarded for years feels overdue. Gov Ball is just the opening act. The mirror, like the best Depop finds, is one to keep an eye on.
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