The world did not have a stellar year in 2017, but, trend-wise, we definitely had a lunar year thanks to the return of Space Age fashion.
You could argue that the trend actually started at the end of last year with Vivienne Tam's NASA-inspired S/S 17 collection.
It continued in February this year: the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow provided a fresh inspiration for Felipe Oliveira Baptista's Lacoste A/W 17 collection, showcased during New York Fashion Week.
During the men's shows in New York, astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, 87, was invited to take not a giant leap for humankind, but a small step for fashion on Nick Graham's space-themed runway.
Graham's collection was inspired by life on Mars and Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon in 1969 during the Apollo 11 space mission with Neil Armstrong, modelled a metallic silver bomber jacket, a black T-shirt bearing the phrase "Get Your Ass to Mars", a slogan from the eponymous campaign launched by Aldrin as part of his ShareSpace Foundation, and black trousers accessorised with silver sneaker.
In February NASA also revealed that scientists 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 from the Earth.
The news, as you may remember from a previous post, coincided with other space fashion-related events, including the launch of Christopher Kane's Space Collection and the landing of UFOs on Alessandro Michele's A/W 17 collection for Gucci. The theme was expanded in the collection campaign that paid homage to science fiction and films from the '50s and '60s.
The Space Age shenanigans continued in Paris on Chanel's A/W 2017 runway: here Karl Lagerfeld launched space-themed clothes and accessories that included silvery capes, glittery boots, luxury hoods with prints of X-rayed spacesuits and eveningwear embroidered with constellations and matched with planet-shaped round bags.
At the end of the runway the life-size rocket in the background also lifted into the venue reaching its ceiling while Elton John's "Rocket Man" played in the background.
This Fall Buzz Aldrin lent his name to the "Mission to Mars" collection of coats, duffels and backpacks, in collaboration with streetwear label Sprayground.
Some of the pieces feature again Aldrin's slogan: the former astronaut has indeed taken the opportunity offered by these fashion collaborations to promote his passion for interplanetary travel and the vision of his ShareSpace Foundation.
The latter promotes science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) for children via hands-on activities, inspirational messages and educational visits. While Aldrin hopes to educate via this space age fashion collection, model Natalia Vodianova's Naked Heart Foundation (a charity helping children with special needs) is getting ready to raise funds next February with its Fabulous Fund Fair charity event that will be inspired by intergalactic space.
So why are we living through this space invasion? Well, we already found the reason in a post in February, but now we are having the final confirmation: when it was first launched Space Fashion was about the optimism offered by space discoveries and future hopes for humanity.
We do live in very bleak times and quite often even films present us with a twisted reality that, rather than transporting us on another planet for a couple of hours, fills us with fears and anxieties, offering us scenes of wars, violence and dystopian lives and plunging us into deep dark holes of depression. We therefore seem to have turned to space fashion to escape from such sad visions.
Yet, while we wait to see if the projects of entrepreneurs à la Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and Robert D. Richards, the chief executive of Moon Express (mind you, also Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has financed his own rocket company, Blue Origin, so this is a trend...) will ever be able to send colonists to a galaxy far away, there is an important point to make: the first Space Age fashion designers - think about André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin - experimented with fabrics, materials and silhouettes and the history of Space Age fashion also includes designers who created space mission logos.
So, here's a lesson for fashion designers and creative minds out there who love this trend: remember that, while there is nothing bad about doing a line of clothes and accessories inspired by space, the real experimental Space Age fashion of the future should move from other inspirations and look at materials and textiles.
For example, in 1991 Sakase Adtech Co., Ltd. designed a triaxially woven carbon fiber textile that was then manufactured in 2002 (currently part of the collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum).
This is a technical textile, specially engineered for high performance use in knee braces, skis, fishing rods and running shoes since it has got an extraordinary strength and it is nearly weightless. The structure of the textile allows it to be shaped and molded easily because it has three different axes.
The technology for triaxial weaving was actually invented centuries ago during the Nara period (710–794 AD). It was rediscovered by NASA in the 1960s for use in aeronautics (and in 1992 couturier Azzedine Alaïa developed a few designs using a very special carbon yarn originally developed by NASA for astronauts' uniforms...). This proves in a way that the future of fashion stands in readapting and transforming old techniques and not in manufacturing products that do not have anything innovative about them, but just vaguely hint at an impossibly hip but distant and fictitious future.
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