Try On a Fur Coat Online, Free — By Day or By Night

Until this week, the best part of our virtual try-on was behind an email address. You could put a fur on yourself for free, but changing the scene, adding glasses or a bag, or seeing the same picture at night needed an account. As of 10 September, all of it is open to everyone. You can try on a fur coat online, free, and change the background, the light and the accessories without giving us anything. The only thing an email buys now is more goes in a day.

Every picture in this post was made in the studio with one photograph of a model and the fuchsia hi-low mink from our clearance rail. Nothing was retouched, and every one keeps the credit bar along the bottom, because that is how we want them.

Nine backgrounds, and every one of them by day or by night

Pick a scene and the studio puts you in it: Paris in the snow, Central Park, Aspen, a winter wedding, a fur party, a cruise in Alaska, a department store, a fine restaurant, a ski slope. What is new since last week is a pair of chips under whichever scene you pick, one pale and one navy. Tap the navy one and the same fuchsia is shot after dark.

Look at what the light does to the colour. In daylight the fuchsia is a clean hot pink with the guard hair catching white; under the lamps it drops a full shade towards magenta and the leather trim goes darker still. That is not the tool getting it wrong. It is what a dyed fur does after dark, and it is exactly the thing you cannot judge from a product photograph before you come to West 30th Street.

The three indoor scenes work slightly differently, and the panel says so. In the restaurant, the party and the store, the chips change what you see through the window, and the room keeps its own lamplight either way. The restaurant defaults to night because that is when people are in one.

Colour on the accessories

The style options stack, unlike the backgrounds. Glasses, a pocketbook, boots, stilettos, a watch, a necklace, earrings, a fur headband: tick as many as you like and they all go on together. The change this week is the strip of swatches that appears under whichever one you tapped last. Earrings come in gold, silver, rose gold and platinum. Glasses come in black, tortoise, gold, silver and rose gold.

Two honest notes on that picture. The hi-low itself is right: the zip, the leather band at the hem, the wide fur-turned cuffs, the curve of the hem front to back. But nobody asked for a matching fur hat, matching gloves or matching boots, and the tool added all three in every scene. It dresses you head to toe in the colour you chose. Treat everything you did not tick as Google’s idea rather than ours.

The piece in the pictures, and its six other colours

Something else went onto the product pages this week. Where a piece is made in several colours, its page now shows all of them in a row under the try-on button, and you can step across without going back to the collection. The fuchsia hi-low is one of seven: black, brown, burgundy, emerald green, fuchsia, royal blue and ruby red, every one at the same clearance price.

Try the colour rather than guessing at it. Open the fuchsia, press the green button, and then step across to the burgundy or the royal blue and press it again. Most people are wrong about their own colour in one direction or the other, and a minute with the tool settles it before anyone has driven anywhere.

Everything in this post is on the clearance rail

The hi-low, the hooded jackets that went up on Friday, the crop jackets, the degradé hooded pieces: all of it sits in the Fur Coat Clearance Sale collection at a clearance price, and all of it can be tried on the same way. These are the three newest.

Try it on now, and put it somewhere

It takes one photograph of you, full length, in ordinary clothes. Press the green Virtually Try It On button on any piece, upload the picture, and the first result is back in about twenty seconds. Then pick a scene, pick day or night, tick whatever accessories you want and their colours, and press the big black button that says Update My Image. Every result stays in a strip underneath so you can go back to an earlier one.

Guests get three a day. If you want more than that, the studio asks for an email address and sends a six-digit code, and that is the entire sign-up: no password, no account page, nothing to manage. A verified address simply has no daily limit. Everything else on this page you already have.

What it is honestly good at, and what it is not

It is good at the piece: the length, the hem, where the cuffs fall, how a dyed fur behaves in different light. Those are the things you cannot judge from a product photograph on a model who is not you, and they are the things the try-on gets right often enough to be useful.

It is not a fitting. It re-poses you, it dresses you in accessories you never chose, it renders an illustration rather than the actual skins. When the picture makes you want the piece, the next step is the same as it has always been: come in, and we will fit it, alter it and look after it for as long as you own it. Or call the shop and ask which colour we would put you in. We have opinions too.