In yesterday's post we looked at Christopher Kane's A/W 2017 collection, with its Space Age references. As stated in that post, among the main accessories introduced during Monday's runway there were Kane's futuristic Safety Buckle bags and high-top sneakers (the safety buckle is a trademark motif that first appeared in Kane's 2007 collection).
These accessories are part of the Space Collection and their colours are described as "Pitch Black, Venus Pink, Mars Red, Solar Sun, Yellow Moon Dust, and Planet Blue".
The most cosmic thing about them is not the price (around €900 for the bag and €400 for the sneakers...) nor the fact that you can already purchase them on Kane's site, but the announcement that a bag and a pair of sneakers were launched into space on February 6th from Ashbourne in Derbyshire, England. They landed about three hours later within 193 Km from the takeoff spot, having reached an altitude of up to 38km above the Earth and having sustained pressure close to 0% of that at sea level and temperatures of minus 64 degrees Celsius.
Kane is not the only one who took a renewed interest in space: Molly Goddard recently designed two flat boots for Topshop (one in a silvery moon shade) that call to mind André Courrèges' 1965 iconic white kid boots (Goddard's boots do not feature an open toe or cut-out top, still the shape is very similar to Courrèges').
On the New York Fashion Week runways instead the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow provided a fresh inspiration for Felipe Oliveira Baptista's Lacoste A/W 17 collection, while, as you may remember from a previous post, Vivienne Tam invited us to join NASA with her S/S 17 collection.
Alessandro Michele at Gucci was the latest designer to jump on the sci-fi bandwagon: his collection, showcased today in Milan was another orgy of antiquarian and historical details remixed with the present and the future. One of his skirts featured a print of a floral painting with a vintage UFO flying above it and three smaller flying saucers joining the mothership from a blouse.
These new cosmic fashion references arrived while Russian KosmoKurs announced a few days ago that it will start selling tickets for its commercial passenger spacecraft (for $250,000) next year, to try and beat Virgin's Richard Branson and Tesla founder Elon Musk into orbit.
Interestingly enough, when it was first launched, Space Age fashion was full of hope and optimism, while now, we seem to have turned to it to escape from our sad and complicated planet.
The possibilities of finding a new place where we could move seem in the meantime to have increased: NASA revealed today that scientists have identified via the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope seven Earth-size, habitable-zone planets around a ultra-cool dwarf star, an exoplanet system called TRAPPIST-1 located at about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius. It looks like fashion designers have some fresh cosmic inspirations awaiting for them...
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