Combining items of clothing into an outfit is a major task in fashion retail. Recommending sets of items that are compatible with a particular seed item is useful for providing users with guidance and inspiration, but is currently a manual process that requires expert stylists and is therefore not scalable or easy to personalise. We use a multilayer neural network fed by visual and textual features to learn embeddings of items in a latent style space such that compatible items of different types are embedded close to one another. We train our model using the ASOS outfits dataset, which consists of a large number of outfits created by professional stylists and which we release to the research community. Our model shows strong performance in an offline outfit compatibility prediction task. We use our model to generate outfits and for the first time in this field perform an AB test, comparing our generated outfits to those produced by a baseline model which matches appropriate product types but uses no information on style. Users approved of outfits generated by our model 21% and 34% more frequently than those generated by the baseline model for womenswear and menswear respectively.

Compatibility between items, such as clothes and shoes, is a major factor among customer's purchasing decisions. However, learning "compatibility" is challenging due to (1) broader notions of compatibility than those of similarity, (2) the asymmetric nature of compatibility, and (3) only a small set of compatible and incompatible items are observed. We propose an end-to-end trainable system to embed each item into a latent vector and project a query item into K compatible prototypes in the same space. These prototypes reflect the broad notions of compatibility. We refer to both the embedding and prototypes as "Compatibility Family." In our learned space, we introduce a novel Projected Compatibility Distance (PCD) function which is differentiable and ensures diversity by aiming for at least one prototype to be close to a compatible item, whereas none of the prototypes are close to an incompatible item. We evaluate our system on a toy dataset, two Amazon product datasets, and Polyvore outfit dataset. Our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we show that we can visualize the candidate compatible prototypes using a Metric-regularized Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (MrCGAN), where the input is a projected prototype and the output is a generated image of a compatible item. We ask human evaluators to judge the relative compatibility between our generated images and images generated by CGANs conditioned directly on query items. Our generated images are significantly preferred, with roughly twice the number of votes as others.