Ruby Aldridge
Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Taylor
Rebecca Taylor wants to make fashion more consumer-oriented. After several seasons of holding private appointments at her showroom, the designer—known for her ultra-feminine, It girl-friendly clothes—decided to forgo that idea for Fall 2018 and partner up with Tilt Brush by Google, a virtual reality app that allows users to “paint” a three-dimensional space, for an immersive experience that both enhances her collection and gives Taylor fans the chance to try their hand at augmented reality.
“I went to the Dior exhibit in Paris recently and it really blew my mind,” the New Zealand-born designer said at her Meatpacking District boutique during New York fashion week. “It was really a lesson to me on how an exhibition can be so impactful, and it really inspired me in so many ways.”
Taylor hasn’t held a full-fledged runway show since Spring 2015, but the new project speaks to how more and more designers are experimenting with different ways to present their collections.
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Rebecca Taylor and Google’s Tory Voight
Photos: Courtesy of Rebecca Taylor
“This is our first real venture into fashion week,” said Tory Voight, engineering program manager of VR for Google. “We’re always looking for how our products can exist in the real world, not just to accentuate experiences, but to be used as a tool for designers.”
Voight said the collaboration with Taylor is an “experiment” of sorts—designers could potentially use VR tools to create mock-ups and play around with color swatches, for instance. “Tilt Brush can be really helpful for a designer like Rebecca in the planning stages, namely the drafting process, because you can literally paint from a palette with two controllers.” (For the record, Taylor didn’t utilize Tilt Brush when designing her latest offering, but simply approached Google to help her enhance her presentation.)
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Rebecca Taylor and Google’s Tory Voight
Photos: Courtesy of Rebecca Taylor
“This is our first real venture into fashion week,” said Tory Voight, engineering program manager of VR for Google. “We’re always looking for how our products can exist in the real world, not just to accentuate experiences, but to be used as a tool for designers.”
Voight said the collaboration with Taylor is an “experiment” of sorts—designers could potentially use VR tools to create mock-ups and play around with color swatches, for instance. “Tilt Brush can be really helpful for a designer like Rebecca in the planning stages, namely the drafting process, because you can literally paint from a palette with two controllers.” (For the record, Taylor didn’t utilize Tilt Brush when designing her latest offering, but simply approached Google to help her enhance her presentation.)
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Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Taylor
For fashion consumers, virtual reality offers a whole world of possibilities in which they can connect with a brand. “It’s kind of the perfect marrying of an industry we admire and that has a lot of traditions with this new technology,” Voight said.
While Tilt Brush was featured at Refinery 29’s interactive exhibition 29Rooms two years ago, Voight added that this is the first time Google engineers have ever paired up with a fashion designer. “We’re really interested in how New York fashion week can, with technology, deviate from the norm of a runway show to something a little more intimate like this,” Voight said.
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Ruby Aldridge
Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Taylor
“It’s been really rewarding and exciting to work with Rebecca throughout three facets: projection mapping, traditional VR as a creation tool, and AR as an experience to accentuate fashion for users,” Voight continued. “Rebecca’s great because she almost thinks like an engineer in terms of understanding the process of building something new, the chaos that might ensue, the a-ha! moments you might have, and just taking a risk to have an untraditional set up like this. We’re excited to see how fashion designers can use VR and AR for their creative workflow and planning processes.”
While VR has been an exciting element to fashion and art events for some time now (last year, Google’s Cultural Institute partnered up with almost 200 institutions to give viewers an up-close and personal look at some of the word’s best costume archives), it’s fast becoming a medium that has potential to revolutionize fashion—and how it’s designed, presented, and viewed—as we know it.
For Taylor, it’s purely about fun. “I feel like people are getting a little bit jaded,” she said. “Fashion still has a lot of excitement. I just want to sort of bring the magic back to fashion week a little bit.”
Source: FASHION UNFILTERED