The Indian Behind Google’s ‘We Wear Culture’ Project

Google’s new ‘We Wear Culture’ project has made life easier for fashionistas, and all the new entrants into the complex world of lifestyle. The digital project, led by Indian-American engineer Amit Sood, helps you explore cultural treasures from museums and archives in extraordinary detail.

Sood’s involvement in the project

Sood, who was born in Mumbai, heads Google’s non-profit arm, Google Cultural Institute, at Manhattan. Their new project provides access to artworks and collections based on fashion from around the world using the latest technology.

Sood, who calls himself someone who viewed “fashion as a slightly elitist area,” said he turned to some of the industry’s heavyweights to understand “haute couture,” New York Times reported. He was helped along by British fashion designer Paul Smith and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who guided him toward her friend Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Met’s Costume Institute.

We Wear Culture Project

The ‘We Wear Culture’ digital project, which is available at g.co/wewearculture and through the Google Arts & Culture mobile app on iOS and Android, includes everything and anything that could possibly relate with fashion. You can have on your fingertips more than 180 museums, fashion institutions, schools, archives and other organisations from fashion hubs like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and São Paulo.

It is a searchable guide with access to about 30,000 fashion pieces that you can explore according to different themes, time periods and trends. Curated in detail is information related to the arts and craft behind what you wear, the famous models, designers and other trendsetters who influenced the way we dress, and the journey of fashion as chronicled by exhibits in several museums across the world.

Earning a pride of place in the section on ‘Origin Stories’ of various garments is ‘The Story of the Sari’ while the image of a Lambani embroiderer at Sandur, Karnataka, gets prominent display under the head ‘The Impact of Fashion’. Also explored in detail are landmark moments in fashion, such as the Coco Chanel’s Black Dress or Ferragamo’s iconic ‘Marilyn Monroe’ stiletto.

You can also watch in 360° the behind-the-scenes activity in the conservation lab of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once you are done with that, move on to exploring the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona or the Kobe Fashion Museum.