A method and system generate an ensemble image representation for cross-domain retrieval of a fashion item image from a database by using a three-stream Siamese triplet loss trained convolutional neural network to generate a first retrieval descriptor corresponding to an inputted query image; using an average precision loss trained convolutional neural network to generate a second retrieval descriptor corresponding to the inputted query image; concatenating both the first retrieval descriptor and the second retrieval descriptor; and I2-normalizing the concatenated result to generate the ensemble image representation. During a first stage of the method and system, database items are cropped using a trained fine-grained fashion item detector.