Some people visit a Starbucks or LEGO store everywhere they travel. I go to Gentle Monster.
The Korean eyewear brand’s stores are a regular stop on my itineraries, partly to pick up a pair of sunglasses, but mostly to see what wonderfully strange art installation awaits inside. So when Gentle Monster invited me to try its new Google-powered Intelligent Eyewear at a New York City pop-up, I expected something totally unconventional.
What I, perhaps, didn’t expect? That I’d be asking Gemini to interpret a tarot pull while contemplating my wedding planning alongside realistic horse animatronics, a ginormous fuzzy blue monster and a bulletin of Bermuda Triangle conspiracy theories.
Founded in Seoul in 2011, Gentle Monster’s identity is built on experimental eyewear and avant-garde retail design. Its fashion credentials include collaborations with Moncler and Maison Margiela, but teaming up with Google is a new frontier of style and technology.
What kind of relationship should technology have with humanity?
The intricacies of such a relationship is on full display at the pop-up space timed to the release of Google Intelligent Eyewear collections, starting at $449 for Gentle Monster styles. The Wall Street warehouse has been transformed into a multi-environment experience intended to learn through Gemini on the smart glasses.
“Gemini, can I afford this wedding?”
Inside the pop-up, I sat down in front of a tarot deck, unfamiliar with where to start. I asked Gemini to walk me through pulling a reading, step-by-step, starting with intense focus on a pointed question a while I shuffled. I’m planning a wedding, so uncertainty and anxiety around budgeting is hardly in short supply.
I then learned how to pick my cards, and how they could be interpreted based on the order in which I pulled them. Naturally, I took Gemini’s explanations with a grain of salt, but appreciated having a way into something unfamiliar without needing to know the right questions first.
Feeling somewhat reassured that a wedding isn’t entirely financially irresponsible, I migrated to a bodega-style setup to see how Gemini’s visual intelligence can help me get dinner on the table. I spotted gochujang and asked for an easy recipe using ingredients I probably already had at home, and Gemini suggested a delicious-sounding noodle dish.
In a gym setting, I asked it to walk me through throwing a football with a proper spiral. A museum-style display about Bermuda Triangle conspiracies offered another rabbit hole, with material in different languages for Gemini to help explain.
Most memorably, I spoke English with a woman speaking Mandarin about her hometown of Shenzhen. After a few exchanges, the translation’s slight delay became less distracting, and I could follow my curiosity about the city’s traditional food culture.
Celebrating human art in an AI world
Then there was the massive showroom installation featuring faceless, crawling AI mannequins alongside hyper-realistic horse animatronics assembled by hand.
Gentle Monster says the collection began with a question: “What kind of relationship should technology have with humanity?” Its answer positions technology as something that can expand how we perceive and experience the world.
I appreciated Gentle Monster’s commitment to physical art in the wake of introducing yet another way to bring AI into our lives, and now literally on our faces. There’s remarkable human craftsmanship to examine, and doing so while wearing Google intelligent eyewear only elevated my ability to appreciate the abundance of creativity it takes to design a space like this.
That’s what keeps me visiting Gentle Monster stores around the world. The spaces always reward curiosity. Here, the glasses gave me another way to act on it, whether I was navigating a language barrier or admitting I didn’t know how to read tarot cards
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