A New Chapter in The Met's Partnership with Google: We Wear Culture

«Today, in partnership with Google and 182 other cultural institutions around the world, we launched our latest major collaboration with Google Arts & Culture: We Wear Culture.»

We Wear Culture stitches together the art, history, and scholarship of fashion from around the world into a single platform. A total of 30,000 works of fashion from 183 partners in 40 countries are available on the platform, and the stories of these works are shared through more than 450 curated, interactive stories, ranging in topic from traditional dress to contemporary couture.

The Met has contributed over 500 works from the world-class collection of The Costume Institute to the project, all of which are shown in hi-resolution imagery that allows users to zoom in to see the objects in fine detail. We're also using We Wear Culture as an opportunity to share stories about some of the iconic designers included in our collection—including Coco Chanel and Christian Dior—as well as providing a unique, behind-the-scenes lens on the incredible work of the Costume Institute's Conservation Laboratory.

Additionally, building on the success of our first series of 360-degree videos—which reached more than 11 million users and won two 2017 Webby Awards as well as a 2017 Shorty Award—we have also produced a new 360-degree experience for We Wear Culture. This immersive experience leverages the potential of Google's Daydream platform to build interactive components into the story; in this case, providing a rare lens into the interior of our Conservation Laboratory and the range of work it undertakes to preserve this incredible collection for future generations.

The Met has had a longstanding partnership with Google. We collaborated on the launch of Google Art Project back in 2011, when we contributed high-resolution images of 80 objects from The Met collection to its platform. We also added 360-degree panoramic views of our galleries to Google Street View, a first step in making the New York City experience of the Museum available to users around the globe. Since then, we've experimented with image recognition through Google Goggles and shared with the world one of our most prized masterworks—Pieter Bruegel's The Harvesters—in gigapixel detail.

We believe that there is at least one object in The Met collection that could inspire every person on this planet. Thanks to digital technologies and our partnership with Google, the Museum can now reach an audience of more than three billion internet-connected people around the world. The Costume Institute's collection provides extraordinary inspiration, and there is no better way to amplify that experience than by standing alongside the cultural institutions featured in this project.

I'm excited to see the impact it will have.