Space travels, the moon landing and the mysteries of the cosmos have always been great inspirations for fashion designers. The moment the Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on 20 July 1969 entered the imagination of many, prompting designers to wonder what would a supermodern wardrobe be like and generating the Space Age trend that keeps on coming back on the hippest runways and in our less glamorous lives.
NASA shirts and sweats proliferate indeed in the collections of fast fashion retailers à la H&M, but there are echoes of the late André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin, undisputed lords of Space Age Fashion, all over the runways, season after season.
Nicolas Ghesquière looked at space travel for example for his second resort collection for Louis Vuitton. Showcased with a film shot at Axe Majeur, a monumental installation built in 1989 in Cergy-Pontoise, a suburb northwest of Paris by the late Israeli environmental artist Dani Karavan, the collection was an ode to space tourism.
The complex connects Cergy-Pontoise to the Paris historic axis (Louvre - Tuileries - Arc de Triomphe - Grande Arche) that Karavan decomposed in 12 stages, a symbolic number hinting at time, but also at space. Axe Majeur could indeed be considered as a social intervention project combining the past with the future, historical heritage and a new vision.
The same contrasts could be found in Ghesquière's collection: in the film that presented it, models walked along the vibrant red footbridge connecting the sculpture park (that comprises several gardens, plazas and public squares, one outdoor theatre and one huge park), dressed in designs that had some connections with the past, but also invited the viewer to ponder about the future.
Ghesquière included in the collection rich retro-futuristic jacquards; prints combining elements from planet Earth, like a basketball court and a roadside motel, with planets and lunar landscapes; hints at a future in which we may be able to sojourn in space (with Vuitton trunks maybe?); ample coats, military jackets and mini-capes for stylish space cadets.
Trousers seemed to reproduce the padded quilting of spacesuits and water-cooled garments and there were further nods to Courrèges' vinyl designs and to HBO American science fiction western thriller "Westworld" in the triple-layered round capelet motif that Ghesquière already used in Louis Vuitton's A/W 18 collection.
There were also parachute-inspired mini-dresses that seemed to combine vague memories of Balenciaga's iconic baby-doll dress from 1957 with that penchant for flying in space and the aerial view that has become a trend recently. Some looks hinted at uniforms and the final designs with those square shoulders but draped mantles referenced the futuristic togas from William Cameron Menzies's 1936 film "Things to Come".
Ghesquière has a penchant for sci-fi and robots, so this was nothing new for him, but he tried to inject in the collection a healthy dose of optimism for future life in space, but also for a return to normality after Covid-19 disrupted (and keeps on disrupting...) our lives.
At the end of the film, a model stood indeed in the "Esplanade of Paris" section of the sculpture park, gazing beyond it and past the Paris skyline to outer space, and looking forward with hope.
It was obvious that with this collection Ghesquière was thinking about public space travel, but we all know that, currently, this is the realm of billionaires.
The founder of Amazon and of space company Blue Origin (and the world's richest man, with an estimated net worth of $206bn) Jeff Bezos completed yesterday his fully autonomous suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew on the New Shepard rocket.
His crewmate included his brother Mark, his guest Wally Funk, the 82-year-old female aviator who passed the same testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA's 1960s space program but was denied the chance to become an astronaut because of her gender, and Oliver Daemen, 18, a student from the Netherlands, son of a private enquiry firm's chief executive and Blue Origin's first paying customer (the paying customer who won an auction in June paying $28m for this seat, couldn't join the flight in the end, so Daemen replaced him).
Now, despite the idea of bringing Funk seemed honourable, it also sounded as if she were a prop, a way to create a contrast with young Daemen, and the chance to have a woman on board (guess for Bezos the ghost of Amelia Earhart would have been fine as well; why not inviting a female astronaut as well, like Samantha Cristoforetti, rather than having a paying guest?)
The phallic-shaped rocket comprised a long shaft (the booster) and a mushroom-shaped capsule: the shape wasn't actually dictated by an apotropaic ritual, but it has a very functional purpose as, by designing the rocket in this way, the mass of the spacecraft can be reduced.
Named as a tribute to Alan Shepard, the first American in Space in 1961, the rocket left yesterday (to celebrate the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing) from the launchpad in Van Horn, Texas, at 8.12am local time.
The crew capsule successfully separated from its booster, then surpassed the 62-mile altitude Kármán Line, which the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the Switzerland-based world body, defines as the boundary of outer space.
The most beautiful moment happened when the capsule re-entered Earth's atmosphere and three blue parachutes opened up, lulling it to the ground, while the reusable booster successfully landed on a nearby pad. Fashionistas watching the event probably immediately made the connection between these parachutes and parachute-shaped dresses in Louis Vuitton's Resort 22 collection.
I watched the event live with my youngest nephew who hoped that something bad may have happened to make things more exciting and possibly leave Bezos floating in space, adding a frisson of adrenaline fuelled catastrophe to an otherwise rather boring programme.
The trip lasted only 11 minutes and had the feeling of an amusement park ride for very rich people. I realised it took longer to the firefighters to free me from an old lift 6 months ago than to Bezos to reach the Kármán Line and come back, something that deeply annoyed me.
But maybe it was more annoying what followed: during a post-flight press conference, Bezos, who described the experience as "the best day ever", thanked "every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer", adding "you guys paid for all this". Well, at least he was honest.
Yet considering the labour conditions of Amazon's workers, the way independent vendors are treated on Amazon and the other millions of people gravitating around this giant (ever worked as a low-paid Amazon Mechanical Turk?) and after remembering that Amazon's income increased by $70bn during the pandemic, as we all turned to the company for all sorts of products and entertainment while in lockdown, probably my nephew wasn't the only one wishing Bezos would have been left in orbit.
Actually Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO at the beginning of July to focus on the space company he founded in 2000. At times, though his ideas of colonizing space make you wonder if there will be one day more exploited people between Earth and the Moon, rather than just on planet Earth.
Bezos hopes that one day it will be possible to move the heavy industry off the planet and into cislunar space, benefiting in this way planet Earth (Blue Origin has a heavy-lift reusable launch vehicle, which makes the company slightly sustainable).
In June Bezos stated in a video about the flight, "To see the Earth from space, it changes you, it changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity". But you wonder if, to change your relationship with humanity and the entire planet you really have to go on an 11-minute suborbital flight (maybe in his case it would have been enough to listen to Amazon's exploited workers or switch on the TV and watch the devastation of deadly floods caused by climate change all over the world...).
Bezos stated he has always dreamt of going to space since he was a child, but he is not the only billionaire who has eyed space. This very modern race boasts indeed other billionaire men (why never a billionaire woman?) all fighting for the control of the public-private space industry: British billionaire Sir Richard Branson for example has been making a fool of himself since the mid-'80s talking about space flights for ordinary people. Nothing happened for decades, which made Branson sound like your crazy drunk cousin telling everybody at family meetings and reunions about some grand plan he had that, inevitably, never came to fruition.
Branson eventually managed to take a flight to the edge of space aboard Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft, a sort of spaceplane, on 11th July this year. Together with three other passengers and two pilots, Branson reached an altitude of 53 miles (85 km), lower than the 62 mile (100 km) Kármán line.
Then there's visionary madman Elon Musk, chief executive of electric car maker Tesla and founder of the aerospace company Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, in short SpaceX. Surprisingly, Musk hasn't announced on Twitter that he may be going in orbit next week with a Shiba Inu dog as a tribute to the Doge cryptocurrency (something that would have been more entertaining for me and my bored nephew), but the billionaire's space transportation company has a mission scheduled for September - sending an all-civilian crew for a several-day orbital flight (Inspiration4 mission) aboard its Crew Dragon capsule.
In the meantime, in April, NASA chose SpaceX to build a lunar lander as part of the Artemis mission to send humans to the Moon by 2024 for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. Besides, Elon Musk's company is already carrying astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
Who knows, maybe in a few years' time Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and Space X will be like contemporary cheap airlines flying people to space, but, for the time being, some of these ventures especially Bezos and Branson's space travels feel like epically cosmic ego-trips (in which they ventured with rather banal uniforms, I mean couldn't they have enlisted a fashion designer?).
And while the commercial space era is looming, it is worth noting that things are radically changing and what was once funded by governments is now in the hands of private companies and investors and partially aimed at rich people.
Godspeed the new age of space tourism? As we stand, with our feet firmly on the ground, in between Coronavirus, the Delta variant, financial crises, job losses, income inequalities, poverty and climate change, it actually looks like life on Earth for mere mortals is the usual constant battle. So, we can only dream of becoming space tourists, passengers and settlers, while we dread already of becoming trapped in a future dystopia in which Amazon workers toil not only on planet Earth but also in a warehouse somewhere in space. Godspeed to us all, then.
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