ChatGPT Adds Virtual Try-On for Clothes and Accessories

OpenAI has turned ChatGPT into a fitting room. On October 1, the company launched Virtual Try-On, a new shopping feature that lets you upload a selfie and see how clothes and accessories would look on you before you buy anything. A companion Favorites library saves the products alongside your try-on images so you can come back to them later. According to OpenAI's October 1 release note, quoted by PYMNTS, a new "Try On" button now appears on product listings for clothes and accessories, and both features are available globally on mobile and web.

The timing is no accident. ChatGPT has quietly become a shopping tool: PYMNTS Intelligence's October report found that nearly 23% of U.S. consumers — roughly 61 million people — start their online retail search with AI, and clothing, shoes, and accessories made up about 28% of respondents' most recent AI-assisted purchases. For a generation that screenshots outfits, thrifts for the perfect fit, and shops almost entirely through a phone camera, Virtual Try-On lands right where the behavior already is. More AI coverage lives on our AI News beat and the broader GenZ NewZ homepage.

How Virtual Try-On actually works

When you spot a clothing or accessory listing inside ChatGPT, you can now tap the "Try On" button, then take or upload a selfie to generate a try-on image. OpenAI says the reference photo is saved so future try-ons get faster and more accurate, and your saved products and try-on images live together in the Favorites library. The whole experience runs on ChatGPT Images 2.5, a new image model released the same day that OpenAI claims delivers more natural lighting, richer textures, and better preservation of the subject in reference photos, while cutting image-generation latency by up to half compared with Images 2.0. OpenAI says users now create more than 3 billion images a week across ChatGPT Images and its image API.

You are not limited to the button, either. As reported by TechCrunch, Virtual Try-On also works if you upload a screenshot of a garment from any retailer's site — or even a photo of a celebrity's outfit — and ask ChatGPT to show it on you or find buyable matches. That makes the feature less a store button and more a visual search engine for style: see something you like anywhere on the internet, and the AI turns it into something you can buy. It is a meaningful step beyond the older generation of AR try-on apps, which usually worked only inside a single retailer's walled garden.

Shopping is the plan after Instant Checkout flopped

This launch marks a pivot. OpenAI's Instant Checkout experiment — the direct-purchase feature it tested earlier this year — ended in March 2026 without taking off. Virtual Try-On represents a different theory: win shoppers with visual product discovery instead of one-click buying. According to OpenAI's materials, ChatGPT shopping results are selected independently by ChatGPT and are not ads, which the company is keen to emphasize because its separately labeled in-chat advertising business passed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate in September 2026. The message to retailers is that the AI recommends products on merit; the message to shoppers is that nobody is paying to put a jacket on you.

The bigger picture is a race to own the start of the shopping journey. Google got there first with selfie-based virtual try-on back in December 2025 and added shoes in October 2025, and Pinterest and Amazon have been circling the same idea for years. OpenAI is arriving about a year behind Google but with one big advantage: a global rollout everywhere at once, inside a product hundreds of millions of people already open daily. Whether Virtual Try-On becomes a habit depends on how good the images look — and whether people trust an AI with photos of their bodies.

The privacy catch with your selfies

That trust question is the real story. Engadget flagged that the reference photos you upload for Virtual Try-On are stored for reuse — they are deletable under Settings > Personalization > Reference photos, but the default is that they stick around. More importantly, images uploaded from personal ChatGPT accounts can be used for model training by default unless the user opts out. That means the same selfies that make your try-ons look realistic could also be feeding the next version of the model.

For most users the trade is invisible: better images in exchange for body photos on a company's servers. Gen Z shoppers have been down this road before with facial recognition at checkout and data-broker scandals, and the reviews for Virtual Try-On will not just be about how good the jacket looks — they will be about whether the opt-out settings feel honest. Expect regulators and rivals to be watching how OpenAI handles consent here. Check our Internet Famous coverage for more on how AI is reshaping online habits.

What to watch next

The obvious next step is expansion beyond clothes: bags, hats, and glasses are already inside the feature, and footwear — Google's early move — is the gap to watch. Retailers will be deciding whether to optimize their product photos for ChatGPT's renderer the way they once did for Google image search. And if Virtual Try-On cuts return rates, which are the fashion industry's silent margin killer, it could become the sleeper AI commerce hit of the year. Either way, the fitting room is no longer in the mall — it is in your camera roll.