A fashionable tale

ARIEL GARTEN IS A MULTIFACETED PERSONALITY — AN ARTIST, A NEUROSCIENTIST AND A FASHION DESIGNER ALL ROLLED INTO ONE

Defining who Ariel Garten is can put many — even those closest to her — in a great dilemma. While some call her an accomplished fashion designer, others define her as a neuroscientist, while still others address her as an artist and a contemporary intellectual. Ask Ariel herself which of the many hats she dons forms her true identity and she says that it is indeed the confluence of all these professions that best defines her.

As the daughter of accomplished Canadian artist and designer Vivian Reiss, Ariel’s growing up years had one unique element — the absence of the word “no”. While for many, the choice of a career when facing a crossroads can go only one way or the other, Ariel’s principle, according to her, was, “Why not both?” “I was good at science in school and by my late teenage years, I had already started designing and selling fashionwear. Thanks to my upbringing, my internal dialogue was very free. So even when I took up mainstream scientific research, the thought never occurred to me that I would have to abandon fashion,” said Ariel, who was recently in India to speak at the TEDxGateway Women’s conference.

Even as she divided her passion across her various interests, it was never a compromise on success for Ariel. By the time she was in her twenties, Ariel was not only working on deciphering and understanding complex brainwaves in reputed scientist Dr Steve Mann’s lab, but was also managing an avant garde designer store in Toronto called Flavour Hall. “Fashion for me first started in my teens. I had the privilege of growing up around art and my first works featured clothes with my mother’s own paintings. I would go from store to store looking for patrons and surprisingly enough there were a lot of takers. In the case of neuroscience, some of my first works were around stemcells. But later on I found the right influence in Dr Steve Mann’s lab and that was when I started working on deeply scientific areas such as BCI and brainwaves,” says Ariel, briefly recounting her diverse career graphs for us.

Going forward, Ariel not only founded her own company in the form of InteraXon, but also went on to develop the popular wearable tech device, Muse, which in layman’s terms can be called a brain sensing headband. Telling us about her latest and ongoing project, Muse, Ariel says, “It is a clinical grade EEG and while it is chiefly intended as a meditative tool for brain fitness and reducing stress and anxiety, its applications are limitless. By using electrodes to monitor one’s brainwaves, we are attempting to enable one to hear the sound of one’s own mind.” Ariel also recently conducted a project wherein Olympic athletes used the device to improve their focus.

While her store, Flavour Hall is now closed; it is hardly the end of Ariel’s sartorial pursuits. She says, “For me fashion and science run parallel. At the end of the day, they are not all that different and my approaches toward both have so much in common. A big part of me will always be a fashion designer irrespective of my other pursuits.”

Traversing many roads at the same time can be quite difficult for many, but for Ariel, the path she has chosen, according to her, is only natural. She says, “I am hoping that my children can have the same freedom that I did. No matter whatever I chose, my family always backed me. My grandmother is a Holocaust survivor and my mother is a celebrated artist and having such strong women in my life has helped me a lot. Even now when my grandmother recounts her experiences during the Holocaust, I find that there is so much to her that I did not know before. It is through their strength that I find mine.”