Nina In New York: Your Dumb Mirror Is A Thing Of The Past

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

My college dorm room, the movie theater where I saw Titanic fifteen times, the hospital, a funeral home, the dressing room in H&M: all of these places have something very important in common. No, they do not share physical attributes, intended purposes or geographical proximity. But they are all places where I have openly wept. Several times. Many times. All the times.

Dressing rooms are a special kind of hell for many of us, a veritable pit of despair which you enter with all sorts of hopeful thoughts and exit having been robbed of your sense of self and will to live.

Plus maybe a tank top or two.

I don't understand how the fitting room was conceived as a means to convince women to buy clothes. Who could possibly look good in an article of clothing under harsh lighting, in a tiny room, standing six inches away from a smudgy mirror? No one. No one I could bear to know, at any rate.

How many times have you looked disapprovingly at your own dressing room reflection and muttered, in disgust, "stupid mirror"?

Enter the "smart mirror," a breakthrough new technology coming to a high-end department store near you (if you live near high end department stores in select test markets). One type of smart mirror captures a 360-degree image so that you can review in great detail how your butt looks in those jeans. It also provides side-by-side comparisons of you in different getups.

Another allows shoppers to select items for try-on from a digital catalog. The selections are transmitted to a sales rep, who gathers the items and texts the customer when they've been assembled in the dressing room. Because pulling shirts on hangers off of racks and handing them to store employees is so 2014.

Of course, you can use the smart mirror to send images of yourself to friends or post to social media, promising to launch Facebook into an even higher stratosphere of tedium. But then, technology is all about breaking through barriers and defying expectations.

The idea, evidently, is for brick-and-mortar stores to compete with the online retailers who can show you what you've bought in the past and make intelligent recommendations based on owning every salient detail about your life. It's true! Consumers really do love that about Amazon. But the thing the online retailers don't have? The benefit of allowing you to try a product before you commit to it. And yes, the Zappos model of free shipping and returns does make the online shopping experience relatively low-risk, but it still involves charging money on your credit card and schlepping back and forth with boxes. It's terrific for so many reasons, but nothing can replace the convenience and certainty of the physical retail space.

That said, I'm all for progress. This is a pretty cool one, but I think they're overlooking some crucial problems with the standard, "analog" mirror. Can the smart mirror affect some soft, natural lighting and perhaps put you in your new cardigan against the backdrop of a beautiful fall day? Can it add some virtual jewelry and makeup to get the full effect? Or can it take data about your diet and exercise history plus photos of you from various decades and then show you a projected image of how you'll look in that dress in three months after another round at Weight Watchers? Perhaps one could select images of various frenemies and personal competitors to see who would wear it best, just in case one finds oneself pitted against an old high school rival in a sartorial face-off at the reunion.

I suppose you've always got to start somewhere.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!