New Google project digitizes world's top fashion archives

Anyone who has waited on a long, snaking line to get into a fashion exhibit at a top museum knows just how popular they've become - and more broadly, how fashion is increasingly seen as a form of artistic and cultural expression.

Google Inc. is acknowledging this reality by expanding its Google Art Project - launched in 2011 to link users with art collections around the world, online - to include fashion.

The new initiative, "We Wear Culture," which launched last Thursday, uses Google's technology to connect fashion lovers to collections and exhibits at museums and other institutions, giving them the ability to not only view a garment, but to zoom in on the hem of a dress, examine a sleeve or a bit of embroidery on a gown up close, wander around an atelier, or sit down with Metropolitan Museum of Art costume restorers.