Amit Sood is the director of the Google cultural Institute
Tech giant Google is in its foray into the fashion world and no wonder the person who is heading this effort is also an Indian American.
The Mumbai-born engineer Amit Sood is the director of the Google cultural Institute and is the man behind the website We Wear Culture. The website is an expansion of the Google Arts and Culture project, which exhibits high-resolution artwork images from across the globe.
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We Wear Culture tells the stories behind what we wear and explore over 400 stories by curators from leading institutions all over the world. It showcases the famous faces and designers that changed the way we dress, the fashion movements, the making process and craft, and the fashion’s long tern relationship with the arts.
Sood, who works out of a Manhattan office, founded Google’s Art & Culture project in 2011, and it became a downloadable app in 2016. It allows users to visit “1,000 museums in 70 countries” and has many large partners including the British Museum, the Getty in Los Angles. Through theWe Wear Culture initiative, fashion lovers can view over 39,000 garments in collections at more than 180 museums, schools and fashion institutes such as the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
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“I would not say I was interested in fashion as a subject,” Sood told New York Times. “I viewed fashion as a slightly elitist area.”
“I didn’t know who invented the black dress until Kate (Kate Lauterbach, his colleague on the project) told me. I definitely had to educate myself,” he said.
Google is well known for the number of Indian Americans at its top positions including its CEO Sundar Pichai, Sr VP and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora, Sr VP and Google Fellow Amit Singhal and 30 percent of the company’s workers are all Asian.