‘GMAPS’

‘With mass CCTV watching our every move, this emerging University of Westminster fashion student uses Google Maps to create fashion that toys with perception.

Who would’ve thought snooping around Google Maps could end up earning you a decent bit of dosh?

23-year-old Caitlin Yates, founder of semi-eponymous menswear label C8Y8S, makes surveillance-savvy garb, scavenging through the satellite mapping service to find the weird, wonderful and often wonky scenarios that crop up in all four URL corners of the globe.

“Honestly, the concept came to me when I was sat in bed, super hungover, just looking through weird stuff to try and cheer myself up,” explains Yates, who after getting herself into a strange internet hole one night in 2019, decided to make two Lycra tops emblazoned with a lad she found flipping off the Google Maps camera as it drove past him.

After sticking the tops on Instagram, Yates soon became inundated with people wanting to buy her initial designs, including London-based concept store, 50m, which currently stocks a number of her signature styles.

Yates mainly finds her Google Maps scenes on dedicated groups buried in the depths of Reddit and Facebook, and currently has a folder of over 300 odd-ball snapshots sitting on her computer, ready to be whacked on tops, bomber jackets or a pair of jeans, at any given moment.

The appeal to Yates’ work is the unknowingness of these images – Are they real or staged? Who’s aware of the camera and who’s acting completely natural? – giving her designs some political welly.’

The Face Magazine, 2021.

Words by Paul Toner