Inspired by a personal research I've been carrying out on futuristic fashion trends, in previous posts in this blog I have written about cosmic fashion, analysed futuristic inspirations in some of the collections for the next Autumn, explored futuristic architectures in vintage accessories, dreamt about scientific photo shoots and drew comparisons between specific sci-fi or futuristic films such as The Transatlantic Tunnel or Flash Gordon and fashion.
I've always found rather fascinating the fact that many designers from the past attempted predictions about future fashion trends.
Architects Alison and Peter Smithson devised in 1956 their House of the Future project for the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition.
Their house mainly comprised plastic structures and was inhabited by men and women clad in fantastical outfits like cute dresses with jagged edges and wearing hairstyles sculpted out of industrial resins.
In the art world, Salvador Dali suggested a surreal look for 2045, while André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin were considered in the 60s at the forefront of space age fashion.
Nowadays, many contemporary fashion designs inspired by futuristic trends still borrow a lot from the more established and successful space age creations from the 60s or at times seem to be entirely lifted from costumes seen in sci-fi films.
Undoubtedly, research is considered as one of the most important points for contemporary fashion: think about technologically advanced fabrics or the integration of specific devices such as mp3 players into jackets or computer screens into bags, tricks devised by fashion brands in collaborations with companies such as Eleksen (I did a piece a few years ago about this topic, you can check it out here, though that's in Italian), but so far there haven’t been any designers coming up with amazing attires for the year 2050 or the next millennium.
One of the main
reasons behind this lack of extremely futuristic designs is obviously the fact that we live in fast-changing times and
what was fashionable and technologically advanced last
year is now considered as obsolete.
There is something missing, though, in many contemporary futuristic designs and that's maybe the exuberance and humour of some fun experiments tried many decades ago, like the creations shown in this video from the 30s.
In 1970 Rudi Gernreich was invited to curate a show about Future Fashion for the Osaka World’s Fair and came up with an extremely dystopic vision, presenting a male and female model with shaved heads and bodies who lied naked on the floor after removing all their clothes.
The aim of the controversial show was reinforcing the designer's statement about unisex fashion - an idea perfectly embodied by the wardrobe of the Moonbase Alpha crew in the 1975 TV series Space: 1999, designed by Gernreich - while shocking people with futuristic predictions that evoked the death of fashion.
There is a bit of pessimism à la Rudi Gernreich in the revolutionary designs inspired by contemporary challenges such as pollution, environmental catastrophes, global warming or physical assault, like the ones covered by Andrew Bolton's book The Supermodern Wardrobe.
Apparently, integrating communicative technologies into our garments or making sure new fabrics can adapt to extreme temperatures, isn't saving us from the fears and the uncertainties of the future.
Yet I do feel that it would be interesting to try and predict a supermodern wardrobe for the future that would be slightly less pessimistic and more fun, and would be based on the optimism of new discoveries rather than on the aftermath of too many apocalyptic catastrophes.
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