Japan Airlines lets travelers leave their (packed) clothes at home

Japan Airlines is offering to check a big item off your packing list – clothing.

The airline is helping pilot a new service called Any Wear, Anywhere, which lets passengers rent all the clothes they need for their trip, so they don’t have to lug any around. The clothes get delivered straight to their hotel or vacation rental, then are picked up for laundering when travelers leave.

And it’s not just people who can travel lighter. Planes can also cut their carbon emissions by carrying less passenger baggage. A key goal of the service is improving sustainability.

Here’s what travelers should know.

Who can use this service?

Any Wear, Anywhere is only available to travelers flying to Japan on Japan Airlines through Aug. 2024.

How does it work?

Travelers can reserve their clothing up to two weeks before their trips on Any Wear, Anywhere’s website. It will be delivered straight to their hotel.

At the end of their stay, they can simply put the clothing back in the garment bag it came in and leave it at the hotel’s reception desk.

Travelers who stay at vacation rentals may need to set up arrangements with property owners.

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How much does it cost?

Rentals start at $28 for a selection of 3 tops and 2 bottoms. Sets vary by pieces of clothing and season.

Shipping is included in the rental fee, and cancellations are free when done at least 7 days in advance.

Is everything cleaned?

The company says all items are washed and ironed before delivery.

How does it help the environment?

Japan Airlines allows economy passengers to check up to two pieces of checked luggage, weighing up to 50 pounds each.

According to Any Wear,

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Google, ever eager to lean into generative AI, is launching a new shopping feature that shows clothes on a lineup of real-life fashion models.

A part of a wide range of updates to Google Shopping rolling out in the coming weeks, Google’s virtual try-on tool for apparel takes an image of clothing and attempts to predict how it would drape, fold, cling, stretch and form wrinkles and shadows on a set of real models in different poses.

Virtual try-on is powered by a new diffusion-based model Google developed internally. Diffusion models — which include the text-to-art generators Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 — learn to gradually subtract noise from a starting image made entirely of noise, moving it closer, step by step, to a target.

Google trained the model using many pairs of images, each including a person wearing a garment in two unique poses — for instance, an image of someone wearing a shirt standing sideways and another of them standing forward. To make the model more robust (i.e., combat visual defects like folds that look misshapen and unnatural), the process was repeated using random image pairs of garments and people.

Google’s new AI-powered try-on feature, which taps generative AI to adapt clothing to different models.

Starting today, U.S. shoppers using Google Shopping can virtually try on women’s tops from brands including Anthropologie, Everlane, H&M and LOFT. Look for the new “Try On” badge on Google Search. Men’s tops will launch later in the year.

“When you try on clothes in a store, you can immediately tell if they’re right for you,” Lilian Rincon, senior director of consumer shopping product at Google, wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. She cites a survey showing that 42% of online shoppers don’t feel represented by images of models while 59%

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