As you may have heard, the Pet Shop Boys will be presenting their brand new work "A Man From The Future" tonight at London's Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.
The duo started working on this project inspired by Alan Turing - the computer pioneer and Enigma codebreaker persecuted for his homosexuality - in 2012 influenced by a television documentary and by Andrew Hodges's biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma. The new work focuses on key episodes from Turing's life and work with Neil Tennant alternatively singing and narrating them.
Born in 1912 in London, Turing studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, from 1931 to 1934.
In 1936 he published a paper entitled "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (Download Turing_Paper_1936) that laid the foundations for computer science, presenting the notion of a universal machine capable of computing anything that is computable.
After studying mathematics and cryptology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Turing returned to Cambridge.
During World War II Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the GCCS wartime station, where he cracked Germany's secret military communication codes, including the Enigma encrypted signals (with the bombe, an electromechanical device), contributing in this way to the Allied victory.
In the mid-1940s he began collaborating with the National Physical Laboratory, leading the design work for the Automatic Computing Engine, creating a blueprint for store-program computers and addressing the issue of artificial intelligence in a paper written in 1950.
Two years later Turing was arrested, tried and convicted for homosexuality, then a criminal offence. Given a choice between prison and chemical castration he opted for the latter and received hormonal treatment for libido reduction. He committed suicide on 7 June 1954, biting into an apple dipped in cyanide (a reference maybe to his favourite story, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Turing was awarded a posthumous royal pardon at the end of 2013.
Turing was very much a man of the future, not only for his pioneering researches and for bridging the gap between mathematical logic and machine building, but also for his attitude about his own homosexuality. A new film about him - The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum - will be released later on this year, but Turing's life and work come to mind also while exploring other disciplines and fields, fashion included.
Though he proved to be "a man of the future", Turing lived very much in a tailored past made of V-neck sweaters, ties and formal jackets and somehow his story could be evoked by designs such as those seen on the runway for Thom Browne's Spring/Summer 2015 menswear collection.
Browne stated that the collection was inspired by Tron, but there are things - scientific and robotic imagination, machines, and a certain degree of naivety (incarnated by pastel colours and floral motifs) that characterised Turing - that call to mind the polymath and computer pioneer.
Models/guards in an armour-like wool suit (slightly reminiscent of the Cubist costumes by Jeffrey Bryant for the Pet Shop Boys) and carrying laser sabers opened the show.
The robotic guards patrolled 20 masked robot-like models who sat still behind them in classically cut grey suits.
Two tribes of further masked models (the plastic masks created a disturbing marionette-like effect, a sort of crossover between Pinocchio and the Thunderbirds, with occasional and undesirable moments verging more towards the Robert The Robot out of cBeebies's Justin's House...) then followed: one tribe was clad in garments inspired by human anatomy in which heavy padded bulging muscles and six packs ("The Electronic Athlete", the title of a chapter in David Leavitt's biography of Turing, The Man Who Knew Too Much, comes to mind...) were incorporated in tailored suits (View this photo); the other donned jackets and trousers characterised by spikes, points and geometrical shapes, with some multi-coloured garments and suits calling to mind the avant-garde fashions suggested by the Italian Futurists in the early decades of the 1900s.
Various fabrics - embroidered seersuckers, cottons, linens, rubberised tweeds, and Browne's own custom tartan - were employed to create the complicated suits, some of them made with patterns broken in sixty to eighty pieces.
In some cases jackets and socks were decorated with three-dimensional butterflies and flowers, while the pastel shades or flowery prints on Bermuda shorts, pants, vests, short-sleeved or sleeveless tuxedo jackets gave a gender twist to the most theatrical pieces.
Browne stated that this show was a sort of metaphor for an epic war in which everybody lost, including - we may add - the traditional sartorial canon sacrificed in the name of a futuristic and robotic approach.
And while you can bet we will soon see a menswear collection deliberately inspired by Alan Turing, in Browne's theatrical costume drama there was maybe a bit of Turing's spirit, from the man and machine dichotomy to the act of breaking with tradition in favour of gender bending gestures, from the mathematical concept of variables applied to traditional tailoring to the correspondence between complicated patterns and the precise logic of pure mathematics. And what will you create inspired by Turing's theories and ideas?
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments