It may be that the worlds of science fiction are simply more amenable to experimentation, individualism, and broad cultural and temporal appropriation. There is perhaps no better example of what we are missing in our current future than to gaze at the recently late Alexander McQueen’s last collection.
Any one who has read or watched a smattering of science fiction over the past decade or so can’t help but notice that one of the most stalwart of tropes is an eccentric diversity of clothing fashion (the earliest best representation of this on film was, of course, the famous bar room scene in Star Wars). Our descendents, it seems, are flagrantly and ostentatiously diverse and peculiar in their dress. There is, as there must be, metallic pants and epauletted shirts, but even more interestingly is the frequent blending of fashions of the past, present, and future to produce a bogglingly esoteric world of future fashion. This transtemporal or seriously anachronistic approach to what our future selves find fashionable, useful, and interesting offers a compelling vision, one that seems far, far away.
Why is this? We are, after all, living in the future now, and despite the best efforts of a small number of idealistic designers, a decreasing number of meaningful catwalks, and a few ballsy and wealthy women, our fashion is something all together conformist; conformed to a way of designing, dressing, and wearing clothes that comes from a fairly small band of years – at most stretching back to the second decade of the last century. Interesting perhaps. Stylish even. But hardly embracing of a couple of millennia of sartorial experimentation.
It may be that the worlds of science fiction are simply more amenable to experimentation, individualism, and broad cultural and temporal appropriation. There is perhaps no better example of what we are missing in our current future than to gaze at the recently late Alexander McQueen’s last collection.
Alexander McQueen's medievalia, from the WSJ.
Granted, I was trained as a medievalist, so there is much in this piece that sings to my heart anyway (minus, pace, the shoes). But while the design is unlike anything you’d see in the 14th or 15th Century, it evokes, and in evoking it regenerates meaning. Clothing that is about something: a reason to wear it in addition to the fact that it simply looks devastatingly good. Of course, tragically, no one will wear it now, except in reverential tribute.
There is hope and a way forward. The growth of custom tailors, available at a click; imaginative designers who embrace the new, even if it means breaking with the present and exploring the past; micro- or solo fashion houses exploring micromarkets across the economic spectrum; and an unmistakable tension across the entire cultural landscape between the old and the new; the west and the rest; as well as the conservative and the adventurous means nothing but opportunity.
Whether we’re all able to take advantage of that opportunity and find some other future other than that mired in ironic sameness is the question. An effort is underway.