Google plans on digitizing the world’s fashion archives
Google has been allowing its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on personal projects they thought would ultimately benefit the company for many years. The tech giant has since scaled back on the policy, replacing it with a more focused approach to innovation, but Google’s famous “20 percent time” gave rise to some of its most successful products, including Gmail and AdSense.
Back in 2010, a Bombay-born engineer named Amit Sood used his “20 percent time” to kickstart the Google Art Project. This as an effort to digitize the world’s museums, making cultural artefacts accessible in extraordinary detail to millions of internet users. It was a Google-sized ambition that fit the company’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
The project has since grown into the Google Cultural Institute, a non-profit arm of the company. The company is now housed in a grand hôtel particulier in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Having partnered with over 1,300 museums and foundations to digitize everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Marc Chagall’s ceiling at the Opéra Garnier, making them accessible on a platform called Google Arts & Culture.
Now, Google is turning its attention to fashion.
Encouraged by the volume of fashion-related online search queries and the rising popularity of fashion exhibitions, Google’s Cultural Institute has partnered with over 180 cultural institutions. Thus, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Kyoto Costume Institute — “to bring 3,000 years of fashion to the Google Arts & Culture platform.”
Called “We Wear Culture,” the initiative, which was launched a few days ago, is based on the premise that fashion is culture, not just clothes. Led by Kate Lauterbach — a Google program manager who began her career at Condé Nast in New York and has worked for J.Crew’s Madewell. The initiative aims to digitize and display thousands of garments from around the world, stage curated online exhibitions, invite non-profit partners like museums and schools to script and share their own fashion stories. Also, leverage technologies like Google Street View to offer immersive experiences like virtual walkthroughs of museum collections.
For end users, it’s a cultural rabbit hole and research tool. For partners, it’s a way to reach a much wider audience online, furthering both their educational mandates and marketing objectives.The project aims to spread the word that “Fashion is much deeper than just what you wear”. There are stories ans people behind it, there’s influences that come from art, that come from culture more broadly. In turn, what we wear influences culture.
