Gone are the days of longing for your own digital closet. Cloth is the latest clothing-cataloging app for iPhone and iPod Touch, offering a simple, user-friendly interface for the current on-sale price of 99 cents.
Although I wouldn’t normally spend money on an app of this sort, what I do like about Cloth is that it requires no account or registration to use its service. The app’s premise is basic: Take a photo of your outfit of the day, write yourself a note, and tag the outfit with whatever words you like. You can select a category for the outfit, such as everyday, vacation or work, or tap the “Love It” button to add the OOTD to your favorites list. Cloth will store your image and notes, as well as filter the outfit into its respective categories for later looks. Cloth also offers built-in sharing to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, as long as you’ve provided your credentials in the in-app settings panel.
There’s a game aspect to Cloth, which provides points and badges for continued use of the app and for sharing outfits across social media. Although I’m sure reward-hungry users will get some satisfaction from becoming a Cloth King or Twitter Tycoon, I see little point in this feature.
I’m also surprised that the Clothapp blog isn’t better built in to the Cloth app itself. When users upload a photo to Cloth, they can opt to send the image to the Cloth blog, which displays all of the user-provided images. You can only access this from the “Visit Clothapp.com” button in the app’s settings panel, which opens a non-iPhone optimized version of the site. Yes, the point of this app is personal cataloging, but much of the fun of taking the time to photograph your OOTD is in seeing what others are wearing, too.
Cloth makes the claim it’ll “Unlock your closet.” I’m not entirely convinced fashionistas will flock to the service, but Cloth’s ease of use and smart interface means users will get what they pay for, at the minimum.
