What You See Is What You Get

Second in a series on what search becomes in the era of AI. The first essay was about trying to find films by feeling. This one is about finding styles that express who you are.

I’ve built FeelFit, a fashion-discovery tool that starts with a single tap: see an outfit you like, tap it, and instantly get pieces that match your style, size, and budget. The roadmap runs from tap today to gaze tomorrow — discovery that eventually won’t need the tap at all.

What follows is the thinking about why I believe discovery is about to leave the screen, and what it would take to get there.

01 — Searching for a version of myself

What search could be, in the middle of the paradigm shift we are living through, is a question I am still thinking my way through. My first attempt at it was a tool to find films by the feeling they left you with, and it taught me that a new kind of search has to start somewhere people are already actively searching hard. Unfortunately, film failed on that count because people watch films passively, and they want to be fed, not to hunt. So I went looking for a place where people search restlessly, and I kept arriving at the thing I happen to care about most. Clothes!

For me, clothes are not really just about fashion or brands. They are an extension of who you are, which is the most visible, daily, wordless way a person says “this is me”. I developed my style through a lot of looking, and nowhere taught me more than New York. Every day I saw people expressing versions of themselves I didn’t know existed. They are not celebrities or influencers, just ordinary people on the train, on my way to get coffee, in the office. Some looked powerful. Some looked artistic. Some looked completely indifferent to what anyone thought. Each outfit suggested a different way of being a person. At first, I thought I was simply learning what clothes I liked. But what I was really learning was what was possible. I wasn’t searching for clothes so much as searching for a version of myself. That search continued in dressing rooms, store windows, and endless moments of trial and error. I’d try things on to feel what was mine and what felt like a costume. I’d notice which Instagram ads seemed to understand my taste and which had me completely wrong. Underneath all of it, I was actually trying to find who I am. Every so often, everything clicks. What I’m wearing lines up perfectly with who I am, and I feel an enormous rush of energy and ease. That’s the moment I know that’s my style. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it feels unmistakably like me.

02 — The flattened catalogue

The strange thing is that so much of shopping is really an attempt to answer that question. We wander through stores, save photos, try things on, and stare at mirrors not just because we need another shirt, but because we’re looking for something that feels like us. The problem is that nearly every shopping system we’ve built assumes the thing being searched for is the product. But often the product is only a proxy for something much harder to articulate. And yet the way shopping platforms work online today is closer to inventory tracking. They took every physical item, moved it into a digital catalogue, and tagged it with keywords such as pants, tops, accessories, and so you could type a word and retrieve it. That solved a real and genuinely hard problem, which is knowing what exists and where to find it. But it is really not how we, humans, actually think, explore, or shop.

In the physical world, shopping discovery is alive. We explore, we wander and let things catch our eye. We try and we feel how a fabric drapes, how a silhouette sits on us. We style and we combine, adjust, imagine ourselves differently. It is rich, visual, embodied, personal, and none of it survives the trip into a keyword box. Social media moved a sliver of it online. We can browse inspiration and watch someone show us how a thing is worn, but we can only watch. We still cannot try it, cannot see it on our own body, cannot test whether it is actually us; that still happens only in front of mirrors and fitting-room curtains, exactly where it always has. The flat screen flattened the experience along with the inventory, and the part where we find out what suits us has not been solved yet.

03 — A new surface

The history of shopping is, in many ways, the history of how we interact with machines. Every shift in how we interface with machines has already carried shopping a step closer to closing that gap. Each era solved a piece of the shopping journey and made the next piece possible. The web era digitized the inventory, which answered what exists and where to find it, the foundation everything since is built on. The mobile era reopened exploration, which Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok turned discovery back into something visual and alive, a feed you scroll for inspiration, even if you still had to leave it and translate what you saw back into words. And now, in this new shift, what could discovery and search become in commerce?

A few people are creating new ways to shop. Pinterest already does a version of this: tap any object inside an image and it surfaces similar pieces — the visual query made real. Daydream, the AI fashion agent, lets you describe what you want in plain language or hand it a screenshot, then matches that against a catalogue of thousands of brands and gives back shoppable results, sometimes better than the thing you saw. ElevenLabs has pushed voice into commerce, but mostly as an infrastructure layer for stores: an assistant that talks you through support and checkout, not a way to discover in the wild. Even the newest move — searching what you see through your phone’s camera or a screenshot, whether that’s Apple’s Visual Intelligence or Google’s circle-to-search on Android — still routes the world through a rectangle of glass you have to lift, aim, and tap.

But the bigger opportunity, in my imagination, lies in two places at once: the physical world we already move through, and a virtual one we can build to go anywhere and see. This is possible because of a few things arriving together:

• Glasses or other hardware that put a camera — and increasingly a display — where your attention already is, so you can look at something and simply ask what it is.
• Compute small and fast enough to understand what you’re seeing in real time, on the device, instead of round-tripping to a server.
• Voice and eye-tracking that let you point with your gaze and ask with your voice — no mouse, not even your hands, to tell a machine what you mean.
• And models that read your intent from all of it at once: what you’re looking at, what you said, where you’re standing.

Each of these alone is a feature. Together they are a new surface — the way the browser made the web and the touchscreen made mobile, except this time the surface is the world itself, and any world we can build to feel like it, finally legible to a machine in real time.

What that surface restores is the thing flat catalogues stripped out: context. Clothes are never really worn against a white background. We read them off bodies, in motion, in real scenes and real lives — that’s how I learned style on the train, and it’s exactly the signal a grid of product shots throws away. The villain was never the screen, and it was never “online.” It was discovery with the context removed. A surface that understands the world in real time can finally put them back in the world, and it can do it through two doors at once.

04 — Two doors

One door opens onto the world you’re already in. You move through your actual day, and when something catches your eye — on a person ahead of you in the coffee line, in a café, on a mannequin across the street — the looking itself is the query. You say what you mean, more muted, a little less shiny, out loud in the moment, and the space around you answers. The thing you noticed becomes, in the same breath, something you could actually have.

The other door opens onto a world we build to feel like that one. When you’re not out among it, you don’t fall back to a grid of thumbnails — you step into a place that mimics the real world closely enough to carry the same signal: lifelike scenes you can wander, clothes on real-looking bodies, a version of you that can move through it, try things on, and feel what’s yours. Not a blocky avatar mall, and not a virtual store wandered one brand at a time, but a continuous, photoreal world you roam the way you roam a city — the richness of the street, summoned on demand.

Two doors into the same thing. The world finds you when you’re in it; you step into the world when you’re not. What stays constant across both is context — clothes seen the way we actually read them, on bodies, in scenes, in something like a life. Real or rendered is only where you happen to be standing. This is what I’ve started calling Spatial Discovery Commerce: discovery that happens in the space around you — found or built — rather than inside an app, where your environment is the catalogue and what you look at is the search bar. Your gaze becomes the query. What you see is what you get.

05 — Finding possibilities

None of it is really about buying faster. The way you find out who you are is the loop I started with — you see, you try, you feel the involuntary “yes” or “not me”, and slowly the picture of yourself comes into focus. That loop has always been rationed by friction: how many people you happen to walk past, how many things you can physically try on, how many fitting rooms you have the patience for. Spatial discovery doesn’t just make shopping quicker; it takes the rate limit off the only process that ever taught you who you are. The first lets the world run that loop for you as you move through it. The second lets you run it a thousand times — wandering, trying, seeing it on a version of yourself — without a single fitting-room curtain. And the taste that gets learned along the way isn’t the system’s; it’s yours. Every “yes” and “not me” sharpens a mirror that reflects you back a little more clearly each time. The machine never tells you who you are. It just lets you find out.

So this was never really about the coat. There’s the moment you see something and think, “that’s me,” and the moment you can actually become it. For most of history, those two moments have lived far apart — separated by a keyword you couldn’t find, a brand you couldn’t name, a fitting room you never reached, or a screen that forced you to translate a feeling into words you didn’t have.

Search began as a way to find information. Then it helps find products. I think the next chapter is about finding possibilities. Sometimes it’s a film that leaves you with a feeling. Sometimes it’s a piece of clothing that reveals a version of yourself. The objects change. The underlying search does not. We’re trying to find things we don’t yet have the words for. People think they’re shopping for products. Often they’re searching for selves. Search has always been about closing the distance between intention and reality. The day your environment becomes the catalogue and your gaze becomes the query, the distance between discovering who you are and acting on it collapses — not because a machine decides it for you, but because you finally get to explore the answer faster than the world ever allowed.