The Clueless Closet

[humming] So, do you know what stendoll syndrome is? I did not know what stendoll syndrome is. Stendoll syndrome is when you like see it's C-art or see something beautiful, but mostly like a painting or something like that. Stendoll syndrome has been variously known as aesthetic sickness, florentine syndrome, or more colloquially, an art attack. It's a psychosomatic condition where you get so moved by beauty that you develop physical symptoms. It's something that fully overcomes you, and it just kind of changes everything in your body. Like, because it's you for yet. It's kind of like a rousal, actually. That's how I feel when I see stuff, I feel that. I need to feel that as I'm shopping. Meacham Winston-Mary-Whether loves clothes. It's always been a big deal. It knows that not everyone feels this way. So my mother like hate shopping. I never went anywhere shopping with her. She gets literally migraines when she walks into a store. So I would always shop with my father like he loves clothes. Like we're obsessed with clothing. And so it made sense that his father would be the one to take young Meacham to a movie that would become formative for him, and for his love of fashion. So I would have been like eight. I was like you have to take me to see this movie. I need to see this movie. In the first six months that dropped, I think I saw like maybe three or four times. And then when it came on on VHS, I was like we're watching it again. We're watching it again. But I even still watch it often. It's just so much of who I am. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's where it got, yeah. That movie is Clueless. The shopping with Dr. Seuss. But at least I wouldn't skin a colony to make my backpack. Clueless is a remake of a Jane Austen novel. But really it's about the world it's set in. Which is candy-colored 90s Beverly Hills. The world of the main character, Cher Horowitz. That movie is so many quoteable lines, especially like the Billy Holiday line. Do you love Billy Holiday? Love him. Although of course on the first dozens of watchings, Meacham didn't get most of the references. But the part of the movie he did get. The part that he just got that Meacham felt in his body like Stendell Syndrome. Was Cher Horowitz's closet. I knew I wanted that closet. I don't think I talked about anything for like a couple of weeks after. I mean I get a brush my teeth and I pick up my full clothes. Because this is the cool thing about Cher's closet. It is mostly a computer program. At the very start of the movie, Cher sits down before a hulking mass of 90s khaki-colored computer. And on the screen is this Cheetah-patterned software program that Cher swipes through with her finger, scrolling through a series of her outfits which get displayed on a digital version of her body like she's a paper doll. Digital Cher tries on one outfit. The computer says bat, mismatch. The computer serves her another outfit. Now iconic yellow plaid skirt and matching jacket. Cher loves it and excitedly gets up from the computer and runs to her physical closet. Essentially it's just like these racks upon racks of clothing. And the outfit is served to share on a rotating mechanical rack like the kind you see at the dry cleaners. Basically it just gets delivered to her and she's like ready to go. That closet was fully a dream. But in 1995, it was just a dream. How many people owned a personal computer? There was no such thing as touch screen technology or intelligent software that could help you pick outfits. Nor were there digital avatars or even online shopping. If only this dream could somehow be realized. Essentially I was like why doesn't the tech that Cher Horowitz had in the 90s from Clueless exist yet? So Meacham has a very hardy Twitter following. I am medium-sized Meach on Twitter but you probably have me blocked. And he tweeted out basically yeah why don't we have the Clueless closet? And I think it kind of like created a whole not even butterfly but just like a domino effect of everyone. Like oh my god why doesn't it exist? Why doesn't it exist? But then there's like all these other companies saying like it does exist actually it does exist. Turns out the fascinating thing about Cher's closet is not that it hasn't been attempted. In fact it is continuously attempted by various companies and individuals. Many of whom were very mad at Meacham's complaint. So how many companies reached out and were like this exist? Oh my god probably like five or six. It's just that the problem with the Clueless closet is not the technology. As they say we have the technology. The dilemmas with the Clueless closet are way more fundamental. And they amount to almost philosophical problems about how we treat our collections of garments and what we want our wardrobes to be. But first a tiny break. There's new research on pleasure that's actually fascinating and the site OMGS makes it accessible to everyone. OMGS shares findings from the largest ever study into women's pleasure and intimacy. In partnership with researchers at Yale and Indiana University they asked tens of thousands of couples what they wished they discovered sooner. And they found the patterns in those discoveries and all that wisdom about pleasure and intimacy is organized as hundreds of short videos, animations and how-tos on OMGS.com. And by the way half of OMGS users are men. OMGS is consulted by people of all genders. So hooray for generous lovers, right? You'll find specific research-backed techniques. It's the science of sexual generosity and action. See what they discovered today at OMGS.com. That's OMGYES.com. Maxwell, Neely Cohen and Jesse Charr grew up watching Clueless. Before we'd ever met we both had this dream. They each dreamed of the closet. We've just always wanted it. And then Maxwell and Jesse in ultimate couples' goals just made it. When people here we've done this they assume we have the physical component. Like a dry cleaning carousel. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. To be clear, Maxwell and Jesse live in New York City and barely have a closet at all. They made the software from the Clueless closet. They made digital wardrobes. Just by themselves, for themselves, just for fun. And they each did their own versions. So Maxwell's is more minimal and sort of a separate aesthetic from the movie, while Jesse's is a direct tribute. So it has leopard print in the background just like shares in the movie. And Chicago font. Just like shares in the movie. This like computer looking font is called Chicago. Yeah, the accuracy was very important to me. Wow. So you'd think like they did it. They made the app not so hard what's all the fuss. But as you'll hear, the Clueless closet doesn't come so easily. Although Maxwell and Jesse set out to truly make the interface from the movie, little by little, it had to become something different. The first example of this was that Maxwell and Jesse wanted their computer program to assemble outfits for them. They wanted to be like computer, make me an outfit for brunch or for going out or for a job interview or for a rainy day. They wanted a computer that could fully dress them. The original plan, I thought we were going to have, I don't know, like stylistic tags. No, Maxwell and Jesse started to tag all of their clothes with different themes. Vibes, functions, warm fall. But Maxwell and Jesse couldn't make it work. And it wasn't like an AI problem. There was another roadblock in their tagging system. That first day where I actually built the code, I very quickly realized that none of that would be necessary because if you're a normal person, there won't be enough items to actually make any sort of fancy like math equation work. It'll just repeat itself if that makes sense. When you tried to tag it, you're like, oh, it's this shit again. It's like the same jacket. To truly make the level of flexibility of the Clueless computer, to have all the materials for a fully customizable outfit machine, you quite simply need a boatload of clothes. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Whereas if you have 30,000 things, like now we're talking. And so if you have a remotely normal sized closet, you probably don't have enough options to get a fully customizable outfit maker. Getting that many clothing options is ridiculously hard, even for someone who does it professionally. Because on the set of the movie Clueless, the job of actually filling shares closet with clothes is not a job for the costume department. That is the role of the set decorator. So a set decorator is the person responsible for decorating the set. Let's say you go to an empty room and they say, we want this to be a shoe store. You make it into a shoe store. Clueless had a relatively modest budget. And so they shot most of the movie on location in one giant Beverly Hills mansion. And although Shares Closet looks like it's in her bedroom, they actually shot it out in the pool house. And it was up to Amy Wells, the set decorator, to turn the pool house into a closet. And the thing is when you're a set decorator oftentimes work with the costume designer to make sure that if you're in the character's closet, you can get the appropriate clothes from that character to use in the closet. The amount of clothing it would take to fill that entire pool house would be way more than what the costume department had. Yeah, that was a really fun set. But just super complicated as far as just procuring the clothes. It's a ton of work to show even a second of a closet scene, especially if it's a preposterously large fantasy closet. Like my buyers are going out and filling their cars with like zillions of shirts, shoes. You can't even anticipate the amount of stuff like you think you can, and you can. Because it is really hard to fill a super upscale closet. I mean, just imagine all the things, you know, and you buy something cheap and it stands out. You think you can fudge it and you can only fudge it so far before it starts looking really chinsy, you know. So that was very difficult. Closets generally are not the set decorator's favorite. They're an even nightmare for us, a nightmare. So next time you see a closet in a movie, think of Amy Wells. I appreciate the closet and drawer action because, you know, it's like please. So Maxwell and Jesse, without an extra pool house full of closet space, couldn't make the tagging system work. The custom outfit maker was out. And that's kind of when we realized we didn't need to have any sort of algorithms around this because just hitting refresh over and over again was producing so many amazing outfits. I just blew away all the tags and just decided to go pure random and have never looked back. Jesse and Maxwell basically put their clothes on shuffle. And I just hit this and it just randomizes a top, a bottom, and a shoe for me. So fast. I'm sorry. Jesse plays her clothing robot like a slot machine. It's just like the constant like reward of like, no, no, no, no, no, it's like a jackpot thing. Although honestly, I could not tell if Jesse was hitting jackpots or not. All the randomly generated outfits struck me as random. I wouldn't necessarily wear neon yellow athletic pants with glitter, mu mu pumps. But like, it's an interesting idea. And there might be a time and a place for this, right? And I was like, okay, I guess these random outfits, the sort of work, until Maxwell gave me the reveal. We let the robot pick our outfits today. Today, I never would have worn this, but it seems fine. Can you describe what you're wearing? Yeah, I'm wearing some like multi-color, Nike Air Force ones. Some like faux leather shiny leggings with this like cyborg pattern, and then like a very cottage core pink wool oversized sweater. But it works. I never would have, now that you point them out, I'm like, that is kind of a wild combination. Maxwell's outfit too. Once he pointed out all the individual parts of it, I was like, this is bananas. It shouldn't work at all. This is all totally random. And yet it worked. Maxwell and Jesse were mashing genres and purposes in a way that almost seemed unholy. For some reason, it didn't bother me so much to think that a computer might be able to learn the rules of fashion and make outfits. That seemed cool. That was the whole point of the clueless closet. But the idea that there are no rules of fashion, that chaos is as good a stylist as any, that sort of threw me. We already have these kind of like algorithms in our mind for like how we choose our outfits and the things that we think go together. But when you just do pure random, it just shows you anything. And it's the things that we don't think about that we need help with, like not the things that we would already put together. You need help getting unexpected, basically. Exactly, exactly. Although I do get results that have weirdly connecting themes that I never would have even thought about, which is strange considering that like I've bought all of it. I've chosen all of these things, but like you still like, we learn about ourselves through clothing robot. Clothing robot is a very fancy name for what amounts to a simple JavaScript randomizer. But it's funny to think that Maxwell and Jesse's little clothing shuffler is still far more advanced than perhaps the entire production of clueless. This was, you know, 1994 when we were in production. At the time, none of us would add computer literary. I don't even think I used a computer and production on that show. Stephen Jordan, after all, is a production designer, not a computer guy. There was no such thing as a touch screen. And when you first see it on the page, it's like, "Oh my God, how are we gonna do this?" But it was important to really go for it, to try to make this big splashy technology in the very first scene of the movie. But it's gotta be something that no one could even imagine that someone would possess such a programming. Because for Stephen coming out to Beverly Hills to make this movie, he saw a lot of things he never imagined anyone would possess. You know, one point I ran the door of a huge mansion, I went down and elevated two stories to a disco tech under the house. So the closet in the very first scene of the movie had to set that tone. It had to sell that world. It had to be over the top right from the start. And they made the computer screen by basically making it like a digital puppet. So in other words, she would slide the frame, but someone off camera was actually manipulating the frame. Off screen, someone was basically queuing it like a PowerPoint presentation. You know, they would match the peractions and then they were working a keyboard. Clueless is widely considered to have one of the first touch screens on film. And yes, by the time Clueless came out in 1995, there were already fictional touch screens in films like Alien, Entron, and Total Recall. But those were all far future sci-fi interfaces, not contemporary ones. The thing that made Clueless different was it was one of the first times a touch screen was represented as a real possibility. It was really not about making it futuristic. It was just, you know, share was not, she was a very somewhat simple character. And so it's kind of funny that behind the scenes, the movie was so simple. And then it's fitting that the technology of Maxwell and Jesse's app is also really quite simple. Because the hardest part of making the Clueless closet is really not the tech. The toughest part is actually getting images of every single garment you own. It just seems so labor intensive to even just like drag everything and make sure it's the right size. Yeah, and I mean, it's not difficult work, but it's tedious work. Yeah. But I kind of like tedium. And yeah, you could take pictures yourself, but Jesse signed on for extra tedium because she wanted to get professional photos of her garments so that the app would really look polished like it does in the movie. This wasn't just like, oh, Google image search. It was not easy tracking everything down. But then when it's all there, when you can suddenly scroll through everything you wear and not have to hide it away in your closet or smush it in drawers, you suddenly see this portrait of yourself. You can start really understanding who you say you are, I suppose. I was surprised at how little color was in my wardrobe. Because I think of myself as a person who dresses like very colorfully all the time, but it only represented a very small percentage of what I owned. I learned that a lot of the things I have go way more together than I thought. I thought it was like so all over the place and I was such and all over the place person. I think your wardrobe is much more cohesive than you thought it was. And mine was actually much less cohesive than I thought it was. So it's like these things that you maybe don't even realize when you're shopping or when you're talking about your personal style. It's very obvious when it's all on a page in front of you. So it might sound obvious to say this, but Maxwell and Jesse don't have shares closet. They have, through this charming, relatively low-tech system, developed this powerful tool that has helped them figure out their personal styles. But it's not exactly what they set out to make. It became something different. And this is what happens over and over again. Every time there is any media coverage about a new app that's for cataloging clothes, it's always compared to the Clueless Closet. It's true. Share Horowitz's virtual wardrobe is finally reality with this app. Set Decorator Amy Wells gave it a quick Google. But most of these apps without fail turn out to be more like the one that Maxwell and Jesse made. Okay, you take a photo of this outfit and now you have it. Basically, that's literally every single app. And Meacham was unimpressed. What you're offering is to take photos of your clothing and then pick it. That's, that's outfit of the day. That's get ready with me. That's not, it's not showing you anything. It's not doing anything for you. And he reckons there would be a way more lucrative, savvy way to run an app like this. Really it's when you're like online shopping. It'll be like, okay, you have this thing in your closet already, but don't you need this thing that just went on sale? Don't you, like those push notifications, bring it together, baby. Like that's what people need to be doing. So why aren't people doing it? Bring that shopping experience and bring it to the app. Why aren't they turning this app into a tool for shopping? Again, it's not because it hasn't been attempted or that we don't have the technology. It is because this whole endeavor has a strange hex on it, an inherent problem with the business model that most of these apps do not see coming. And I'll tell you about it after the break. Wait, there's a bunch, there's one called closet, look books, scrap, purple, apple planner, my wardrobe. For the sake of this story, I was briefly considering downloading one of these closet organizer apps and trying them. But I don't know, I didn't really want to take the time to photograph everything in my closet because I was busy making this podcast. But also, I never really dreamed of the clueless closet for myself. I didn't want an outfit planning app because I always appreciated that making an outfit for me was like the one thing I didn't have to plan. It just seemed like planning it all and regimenting it all would suck all the creativity out of getting dressed. I don't know, this seems a little rigid to me. Well, I think it's pretty much like determined upon how you look at creativity. My friend James is perhaps one of the most creative people I know. I particularly love creativity within the bounds of order and structure. And the app that James uses to plan and log outfits is called Style Book. I hadn't heard of it. The only other person I know who uses it is my spouse. I have to say, even if other people do use Style Book or an app like it, they probably don't bring it up in casual conversation. Turns out it's not the kind of thing you just readily show people. It's very intimate like it feels like I'm doing a lot right now. Because Style Book is, of course, a wide open display of your entire collection of clothes. But even more intense than that, Style Book can display all this data about your clothes. Oh my god, you can see what colors you wear the most. Yeah, do you want to see? Yeah. Do you want to see mine? Okay. Will you not be embarrassed by my style stats? Wow! So it shows you your item account, your total closet value and your colors. And, oh my god, the total value of your closet that's wild. James has 197 items. And when you see the collective cost all at once, it's a lot of money. Yeah, that's a little much. But, but, but, that total closet value is not there to try to shame you. We've had people who like maybe they lost their house in a fire and now they've recorded all of their clothes and they can use it for insurance. Right, right. Jess Atkins and her husband Bill Atkins have been running Style Book since 2009. And they cannot see James' closet or collective closet cost. We don't know the names of people who use their app. We don't know their closets. Like, that's all their own. Like, we don't and can't access it. Bill has a background in computer science. Jess has a background in fashion. I used to actually get mad when people would say that. They're like, "Oh, you just copied Clueless." No, I didn't. I'm like, "I swear, I actually just really needed it." When Jess was an intern at Vogue and doing other fashion grunt work, she was pretty broke. I just didn't have access to affordable stylish things. But I was like really thinking about how many times maybe somebody saw me and something. How many outfits can I get at one thing? So Style Book is especially good at calculating your cost per wear to see if you're actually getting the most from your clothing. And sometimes a splurge turns out to be a good deal. So like, I have a coat that I bought. It's the most expensive coat I've ever bought. And I think I spent like $600-$700 on it. And I've worn this coat literally. I was just checking the other day. I think it's 275 times. So math, that's like less than $3 per wear. And that price is only going to go down more and more the more Jess wears that coat. Jess said that the average minimum use you should get out of a garment is 30 wears. That's decent value. But again, like Maxwell and Jesse found with their app, what you think you wear a lot and what you actually wear can be very different. Sometimes I have outfits that I think I just think about a lot. Because I'm like, oh, I've like worn that so many times. And then I'll look back and Style Book will actually tell you the last time you were. And it will say like, worn 180 days ago. And I'm like, what? So like sometimes like memory is not as reliable as you think. And I think that is the challenge a lot of people have with shopping. So much of shopping as an activity as a pastime is based on this kind of forgetting. Forgetting what's already in your closet. And so new clothes are sold like a panacea, a way to become cooler or more sophisticated or more professional. Or more beautiful. Any desire you might have, there's an outfit poised to solve it. Forget your old selves put on a new one. Even though most of the time we are probably buying the same stuff over and over. Honestly, 80% of the time I'm like, I'm in love with the skirt and I like look at it with all my other skirts and it's the same skirt. And this is why Maxwell and Jesse believe. Apps for organizing your closet continue to fail. And I've worked in tech for almost 20 years now. Those apps never last. The ones that end up being pretty good maybe like just don't end up getting the customer base and the money that they need to continue. And they end up getting bought or shut down. Because if you make the app well, people will buy less. That to me is like the inherent trade off. So far, this has been the story. Every time someone has grown up with the fantasy of wanting shares closet and then they decide to make it, they realize that the app has to be different from the movie. And then they realize that rather than promoting sales and shopping, what the app does is it just makes you consume differently. Like that's at least my belief. You can't make it into a good business. Case in point. Style book added a shopping feature where you can shop in the app. Yeah, I've never done it. James says whenever they feel like shopping now, they just put their clothes on shuffle. And it definitely makes me like, no, you don't need that other pair of pants because you have plenty. Thank you. Yeah. But what Maxwell and Jesse couldn't figure out is how style book has been in business. I would love to know like what the business driver is. Like how they propose us to investors. Like I'm very curious about the motivation, the business motivations behind that. The answer is that there were no investors. There are no advertisers. Jess and Bill don't even get money or kickbacks from their shopping function. The two lone employees of style book make their money full time, quite literally, from selling the app. We charge for the app so it's not free. It's $4.99. Yeah, well we saw a lot of them. So I don't know, that's it. I mean it sounds like it should be more complicated than that, but it's not. Like you know, over time, we've sold a lot of copies of that. I mean we have over a million users. So there's a lot of people around the world who are interested in this. And I am sure a fair number of them, directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously, were inspired by Clueless. Turns out James was. Yeah, so it's absolutely from Clueless, absolutely. Wait, really? Yeah. Which really means that James and Maxwell and Jesse and so many other closet organizers were inspired by the person who wrote the script for Clueless and who directed it. This is really who the closet came from. So I had to ask the writer director point blank, how did you come up with the closet? When you say closet, there's like two things to that. There's the program that she has on her computer. And then there's the rotating dry cleaner closet. Obviously for my purposes, I'm way more interested in the computer program. But the answer to the physical dry cleaner closet is pretty simple. Writer director Amy Heckerling once saw that rotating closet in real life. I was in film school and I knew this guy who was a big shot in music. In his house, he had that closet. He had thwarted up. He designed it. The computer program, though. That idea actually came from working in film. When we were doing costumes and movies, you have polaroids, so we used to use polaroids. And we would cut them like across to see what top went with what bottom and mix and match. So you have all of those pieces that you photographed. And then you see what goes with what like puzzles. And you go, well, she looks good in this top, but that bottom, but this is too clunky or this, you know. And I thought, well, that would be a cool thing to put in a computer so you could just have it easy access. So it seemed the obvious thing. And it does seem so obvious. It's really not so different from all those closet apps, actually. Have you tried any of these apps at all? No. I mean, you weren't even curious. Not really. I mean, first of all, everything I have is black. So it's like, what's the weather and which black things should I put on? That's how I get dressed. I'm so shocked that you're the person who wrote clueless. Well, I am not that girl. Amy Heckerling is not Cher Horowitz. And that's the whole point. You could write your own personal stories and then you read them and go, I hate me. I would want to read this. So you go, well, what kind of characters do I like in films? And I had made this film "Fest Times", which Cameron Crowe wrote and Sean Penn was in. And the character that we all gave birth to Spakoli was one of my favorite characters. Because he doesn't realize that the teacher has mad at him. He doesn't get that he's breaking rules. He's just happy, you know? So that kind of was like, strange to me. Because so much stuff is upsetting. You know, you read the paper in the morning and you start crying. So that came from like my fascination with people that are happy with themselves. Not from like, oh, I care about fashion. The fantasy of Cher's closet was not the fantasy of a computer with style. It was not the fantasy of a pool house-sized closet. It was the fantasy of a person totally happy with herself. She's just vibing. This is high school, what? In that brief closet scene that inspired Mecha and so many others, the computer, the digital puppet, truly serves as a metaphor as a window into Cher's mind. Because that scene was ultimately a fantasy of selecting an outfit effortlessly and naturally and with joy. Because Cher was happy with herself. And that's what all these closet apps are supposed to help with, right? Even though none of them so far have been Cher's closet at all, what these apps do is they show you what you're drawn to. Present your taste back to you for you to see so that you might become happy with yourself. And in that process, treat style as something separate from shopping, maybe. Well, I have to go back again to like the stop shopping thing because that's literally not me. It doesn't never happen to me in my life. But you know, I don't know, I haven't used your friend's app, so maybe I don't know. We'll see. Articles of Interest is a proud member of Radio Topia. I made this one with help from Charles McFarland. And surprise, this is my little announcement. I'm going to try to make more episodes more regularly about all kinds of articles of interest every two weeks or so. And if you want to keep up with the show and stay alerted for when new episodes drop as well as see some images and links that go with the stories, go to articlesofinterest.substack.com. Special thanks to Tracy Hunt and Anthony Smith and Nancy Hayer. And of course, very special thanks to you, here listener, if you got this far. Please bear with me as I try to make this show more often. I'm mostly a one-man shop right now. But boy, I've got some ideas that I cannot wait to share with you. Radio Topia. From PRX.