It is the charge of fashion to project science onto new realms of possibilities.

Space is not limited to the outer atmosphere. It is continuous. Updogg achieves a new scale of spatial exploration in an endless runway just a few inches off the ground, returning scientific inquiry to unfamiliar territory. Among the various scientific fields pursued at public cost, space exploration is one of the most emotionally palpable and tangibly distant. Cute and curious, Updogg gives itself to the freely traded discourse of popular science and elevates the field’s pedestrian aspects to little heights. In doing so, it implies the impending role of a new branch of public relations that espouses scientific advancements to non-scientists.

Updogg's tethered spatial explorations define boundaries, and stretch curiosities across scientific fields. Updogg similarly elevates spatial explorations in the field of apparel design. Explorations of spatial relationships can launch fashion objects through ever-changing structural advances, and they can advance only so far before they must leave the ground.

Recently, cultural forces have aimed to dematerialize, to engineer air and augment it with new meanings. In high fashion and high science alike, air is no longer synonymous with nothingness. Lightness, or being comprised of air, means embodying the ethereal and is a designation of luxury. The current obsession with all forms of lightness in design, materials and technology are seen in the popularization of wall-to-wall glass as a favored architectural element, and in the marketing behind the Macbook Air, Nike Air, and AirBNB. Arduously sought and extensively funded nanotechnological developments in the field of fiber science allow global apparel retailer Uniqlo to contribute its Heattech and AIRism collections to the commercial market for experiential luxury, an industry chasing lightness. Updogg betrays and embodies this trend and aspiration, by existing in a single, necessary, inevitable size. It removes, through aerospace engineering, the unnecessary.

In the artistic sphere, Jeff Koons’ enormous steel sculptures of balloon animals freeze the breathtaking moment of juxtaposition in a form that is substantially without substance. A similar breathlessness attends the experience of Olafur Eliasson’s urban waterfalls, installations that bridge art and nature into a strikingly perceptible encounter with gravity. As Eliasson’s waterfalls trigger an innate visual understanding of the water’s perceived speed as a function of its height relative to its distance from the viewer, so Updogg embodies a mathematical ratio between the distance of the dog from the ground and the size of the balloon necessary to raise the dog such a distance.

Managing the unimaginable weight of this achievement is a walk in the park.