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Wardrobe filtering rules

How items are selected from the user's closet for a given occasion + season. Implemented in wardrobe_tool.filter_items_by_occasion().

R1 — Occasion-tag match

An item matches an occasion if the occasion tag is present in the item's tags list:

match if occasion in item.tags

Items tagged with multiple occasions (e.g., ["work", "dinner", "versatile"]) are eligible for any of those occasions. The versatile tag is informational only; it doesn't auto-match.

R2 — Season match

An item matches a season if:

  • "all" is in item.season, or
  • the current season is in item.season.

R3 — Combined filter

A candidate item must satisfy both R1 and R2 to enter the pool.

R4 — Pool relaxation (last resort)

If the combined filter yields zero clothing items, relax R2 — keep clothing where the tag matches even if the season doesn't.

This is the lesser of two evils: a slightly-wrong-season piece is better than an empty pool. When this relaxation activates, surface it in the reasoning trail.

R5 — Rejection exclusion

After the pool is built, drop any item whose id appears in rejected_ids. This is applied in Step 4 of the agent, and the exclusion count is noted in Step 4's output.

The rejection reasons are surfaced separately at the top of Step 5's reasoning trail — one line per rejection, naming both the item and the reason.

R6 — Pool ordering

Within each pool (clothing / shoes / accessories), items are NOT sorted by the filter. Ordering happens inside the outfit builder (Step 5), based on:

  1. Type required by the occasion (top → bottom → shoes → accessories → outerwear).
  2. Formality match for the occasion's expected formality.
  3. (Phase 4) Wear-history freshness — fresher items preferred.
  4. (Phase 3) Fit-profile alignment.

R7 — Empty-pool handling

If, after all filters and exclusions, a pool is empty:

  • The outfit builder produces a best-available result with the items it can find.
  • Step 6 (gap check) catches the missing required pieces.
  • The reasoning trail surfaces the constraint that led to the empty pool.

The agent never fakes a piece. An empty pool is honest data.

Source basis

Primary category: Wardrobe management / digital closets (docs/evidence-and-references.md §3.7). Secondary: Personalization and user feedback (§3.8). Current basis: Industry closet-management heuristics. The pool-relaxation rule (R4) is a design-informed UX choice — "a slightly-wrong-season piece beats no piece." No specific peer-reviewed citation yet.