Virtual try-on in fashion retail: a bibliometric investigation of research trends and future directions

Purpose This study examines the existing literature on virtual try-on (VTO) in fashion retail. It is achieved through the application of bibliometric analysis and network visualization techniques. This paper aims to identify gaps in the literature that may influence future research in this domain. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted a structured approach and examined 344 research articles extracted from the Scopus database from 2015 to 2025. During the process, bibliometric applications, namely, Biblioshiny and VOSviewer, were used to generate inferences and provide meaningful directions. Findings The bibliometric analysis was conducted on 344 research articles contributed by 1,099 authors. Two or more authors contributed to the majority of articles, and that collaboration is higher in this domain. China tops in both article production and citations, followed by the USA and South Korea in article production and the UK and the USA in citations. Wuhan Textile University in China contributed the most articles, that is, 65, within the data set. “Virtual try-on” has the majority of keyword co-occurrences and connections. This is followed by “cloth simulation”, “customer experience”, “customer vision”, “image generation” and “knowledge distillation”, which are also deemed important. The authorship collaboration network pinpointed larger research partnerships between countries from different regions. Originality/value This study extends the existing literature and is among the first to systematically map the diverse research on VTO in fashion retail. This study may serve as a reference for future research surrounding VTO.