1. Headline & intro
Alta’s collaboration with New York label Public School is easy to dismiss as another shiny fashion-week gimmick. It isn’t. It’s an early glimpse of what happens when the nostalgic fantasy of the Clueless digital closet collides with real e‑commerce infrastructure. If Alta succeeds, the way we browse, try and buy clothes online changes from static pictures and size charts to persistent, AI-powered avatars that follow us across stores. In this piece, we’ll look at what the Public School deal really signals, who stands to gain or lose, and how this could reshape fashion – particularly for European consumers.
2. The news in brief
According to TechCrunch, Alta – the Clueless-inspired fashion app started by Jenny Wang – has launched its first deep integration on a brand’s own website with New York fashion label Public School during New York Fashion Week.
Alta, which raised a reported $11 million in 2025 in a Menlo Ventures–led round, lets users create digital closets and personalised avatars to virtually try on outfits. The consumer app has been live since 2023 and, per TechCrunch, has already generated over 100 million outfit combinations. It also lists thousands of shoppable brands and has partnerships with Poshmark and the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
In the new collaboration, shoppers on Public School’s site see a “Style by Alta” option on product pages. Clicking it sends them into Alta’s experience, where they can style the collection on their own avatar and then return to purchase. Wang positions this as one of the first examples of a designer embedding personalised avatar styling tech directly into its own site, rather than relying on generic try‑on widgets.
3. Why this matters
This looks like a small design tweak on a single brand website, but strategically it’s a big step for three reasons.
First, Alta is pivoting from app to infrastructure. Until now, Alta has mostly been a consumer product – a fun Clueless-style digital closet that also drives some shopping. With Public School, Alta is quietly becoming a B2B layer that sits underneath brand sites. If that model scales, Alta stops being just another app competing for downloads and starts looking like a cross‑store identity and styling layer.
Second, it attacks two of fashion e‑commerce’s biggest pain points: conversion and returns. Better visualisation of fit and styling almost always increases the chance a customer clicks “buy” – and decreases the odds they send it back. If Alta’s claim of quickly dressing avatars in multiple items holds up in real‑world funnels, brands may see meaningful uplift compared to slower, one‑piece‑at‑a‑time tools.
Third, it shifts power in the data stack. Alta is trying to own what Wang calls the “personal identity layer for consumer AI and shopping” – essentially, a portable memory of your body shape, style, closet and purchase history. If successful, that puts Alta, not any individual retailer, closest to the customer’s long‑term profile. Brands gain better tools, but they also become partially dependent on a third‑party avatar provider for understanding their own shoppers.
The immediate winners are:
- Alta, which proves it can plug into real brand sites, not just exist as an isolated app.
- Smaller and mid‑size labels like Public School, which get cutting‑edge tech without building an AI avatar system in‑house.
The losers? Any retailer that keeps betting on flat images and vague fit guides will feel increasingly outdated – and platforms that try to do generic, slow virtual try‑on may see engagement siphoned away.
4. The bigger picture
Alta’s move sits at the intersection of several broader trends.
Over the past decade, fashion has repeatedly flirted with virtual try‑on and avatars: Snapchat’s AR lenses, beauty apps simulating makeup, eyewear sites placing glasses on your face, or luxury brands experimenting with digital skins in games. What’s different now is speed, realism and persistence. Alta’s pitch is not just, “We’ll show you this dress on a mannequin that looks a bit like you,” but, “Here is your avatar, instantly redressed across eight pieces, and we’ll remember it wherever you shop.”
At the same time, retail is marching toward what many in Silicon Valley call “agentic commerce” – shopping flows driven by AI agents that know your history and preferences. Recommendation engines and “customers also bought” were Gen 1. AI stylists that understand your closet, mood, calendar and budget are Gen 2. Alta wants to be the data substrate that these stylists use for anything related to fashion and fit.
Historically, whenever a new interface standard emerges – think PayPal and Stripe for payments, or Shopify for storefronts – the platforms that provide the “boring plumbing” often capture more value than any single merchant. Alta is clearly positioning to be that plumbing for avatar‑based fashion.
Competitively, this raises questions. Large platforms like Amazon, Zalando or Inditex (Zara) already invest heavily in sizing and fit technology. Some have toyed with basic avatars or 3D models. TechCrunch notes Alta claims a significant speed and flexibility advantage over Zara’s own experiments. If Alta is genuinely faster, more flexible and brand‑agnostic, it could become the preferred white‑label solution for labels that don’t want to be beholden to a single retail giant’s ecosystem.
5. The European / regional angle
From a European perspective, the Alta–Public School partnership lands at an awkward but interesting moment.
On one hand, Europe is exactly the market that could benefit from better virtual try‑on. Cross‑border fashion e‑commerce is huge, return rates are punishing, and logistics costs – plus environmental pressure – are rising. German, French, Italian and Nordic consumers already buy heavily online from foreign brands, often guessing sizing across different standards. A persistent avatar that follows you from a US streetwear label to a Parisian house to a Berlin DTC brand could dramatically cut friction.
On the other hand, Europe’s regulatory climate is far stricter. An avatar that encodes someone’s body shape, measurements and style preferences is deeply personal data. Under GDPR, that implies heavy obligations around consent, data minimisation, portability and the right to be forgotten. The upcoming AI Act and existing Digital Services Act will also scrutinise how such AI systems profile users and influence purchasing decisions.
For European brands, this creates both risk and opportunity. Local players – from multi‑brand retailers like Zalando to luxury groups in Paris and Milan – have the chance to either partner with a provider like Alta or nurture home‑grown alternatives that are natively compliant with EU rules and cultural expectations around privacy.
European consumers are also more sceptical of being tracked purely for commercial gain. Any avatar solution that arrives here will need to lead with transparency: clear explanations of what data is stored, who can access it, and how it can be revoked.
6. Looking ahead
Over the next 12–24 months, expect to see three things if Alta’s strategy is working.
1. More fashion‑week showcases, more mid‑tier brand pilots. Public School is a strong storytelling launch partner, but the real test is whether mid‑market labels and multi‑brand boutiques quietly adopt Alta‑style integrations. Watch for “Style by…” or similar badges popping up beyond one flagship collaboration.
2. A battle over who owns the avatar. Will every major retailer build its own, forcing users to recreate their bodies and closets repeatedly? Or will a handful of cross‑store identity providers – Alta among them – become de facto standards? If users can carry the same avatar between, say, a sneaker site and a luxury platform, that’s a powerful network effect.
3. Regulatory and cultural pushback. At some point, regulators – especially in Europe – will ask hard questions: Are these systems reinforcing narrow beauty standards? How are children and teens protected? Could avatar data be misused for insurance or employment profiling? Brands adopting this tech will need answers ready.
If Alta genuinely wants to be the “personal identity layer” for AI shopping, it will also have to prove it can be a trusted custodian of that identity. That means robust security, granular user controls, and a willingness to integrate with others rather than walling users into a closed ecosystem.
Commercially, the prize is huge: whoever sits between shoppers, their digital selves and their wallets will influence not just what we buy, but how we think about our own bodies and style.
7. The bottom line
Alta’s partnership with Public School is less about one New York collection and more about a power play to own the avatar layer of fashion commerce. If it works, static product photos and one‑size‑fits‑all size charts will start to feel as dated as dial‑up modems. The open question is whether this new infrastructure will be built in ways that respect privacy, diversity of bodies and European rules – or whether it will be yet another data grab dressed up as convenience. As a shopper, would you trust a single avatar to follow you across every fashion site you use?
