From bricks-and-mortar stores to the rise of e-commerce, the world of retail has transformed over the past few decades to suit the convenience of shoppers. Spearheading a new age of retail, Alibaba recently hosted an interactive pop-up in an effort to push the experience of AI in fashion even further.
A stone’s throw from Milan’s luxury fashion district, “Alibaba Wonder on Ice” offered onlookers the chance to explore an alternative approach to browsing, shopping and styling. By repurposing its trademark AI and cloud technologies – including its Qwen3 series of large language and vision models, Wan 2.2 image-to-video generation model, as well as Taobao Vision’s immersive shopping solution – the experience was designed to generate personalized fashion and beauty recommendations based on current style choices.
As captured in a step-by-step video, Hypebeast’s editor kickstarted the AI experience by taking an image on the AI agent, which was swiftly turned into an avatar for the base of the styling process. They were then asked a few questions, such as preferred colors, go-to hairstyles and, in celebration of the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, their favorite winter sports. Once the prompts were input, Alibaba curated a series of outfits from its fashion catalog, materializing the virtual world into a wardrobe refresh.
The experience, though, didn’t stop there as the AI agent proposed several makeup looks as well as a cutting-edge process for choosing your own unique fragrance inspired by a wide range of worldly scents. The newly styled avatar, along with others created by attendees of the experience, was then projected on a gigantic snow globe pavilion outside the space to showcase the final creations. This featured alongside an exhibition comprising 100 digital works of winter sports, similarly created by fans using Alibaba’s Cloud AIGC to complement the digitally generated “Wonder on Ice” outfits.
Be sure to check out the AI experience in the Come with Me video above. For more on Alibaba’s virtual shopping experiences, head to the retailer’s Instagram page now.
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