Information Designer Giorgia Lupi Debuts a Collaboration With Other Stories That Celebrates Women in Science
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With fashion collaborations now a dime a dozen, it’s rare to find one that feels genuinely surprising. In a sea of influencer capsules and glorified marketing stunts, Other Stories’s new link-up with Giorgia Lupi certainly qualifies—and if her name doesn’t ring a bell, your friends in tech definitely know her.
As an information designer, Lupi is known around the world for her singular, artful approach to data: Instead of relying on hollow charts and graphs, she creates beautiful hand-drawn prints that lend a “human” touch to sterile numbers and statistics. (Her TED Talk about the concept has over 1.2 million views.) Lupi’s work is so striking, in fact, that dozens of her sketches are displayed at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. “As human beings, we have no use for seeing raw data in an Excel sheet, because we can’t detect the patterns,” Lupi tells Vogue. “It’s only through design and visualization that we can access that knowledge, which is why I’m really passionate about this.”
With her Other Stories collection, Lupi is joining an interesting roster of past collaborators, including Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy, Kim Gordon, and Lykke Li. Anna Nyrén, the brand’s head of “co-labs,” says her team was inspired by Lupi’s ability to tell stories with data: “With Giorgia, we talked about this concept of making data wearable, which is very new for us,” Nyrén says. “What we do is so tangible, so we had to figure out how to integrate this topic [of data] in a way that’s relevant and inspiring for our customers, and merge these two worlds that at first seem very different.”
The result is a collection of knits, sheer dresses, blouses, puffer coats, and more bearing prints and embroideries Lupi designed using data collected from the lives of three women in science: Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the mid-1800s; Rachel Carson, who started the environmentalist movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring; and Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to travel to space in 1992. “They were pioneers in fields that were historically male-dominated,” Lupi says. “But I wanted to focus on their significant accomplishments, not necessarily just on their lives as women. Sometimes it’s easier to focus on the obstacles they overcame, but to be really aspirational, I think it’s important to look at the contributions they brought to the world.”
For Lovelace’s print, Lupi collected data from her life and groundbreaking algorithm, which went on to become the basis of every computer. Each passage of Lovelace’s algorithm is represented as a series of dashes, while her biographical data is symbolized by different colors. The print you see on the puffed-sleeve shirtdress looks appropriately tech-y, almost like a motherboard, but when you look closer, the human hand is abundantly clear.
