Fashion and Space

Mark Timmins

By the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, we will have had our first commercial tourists in space. Admittedly this will only just be in space but weightlessness will be achieved and at this juncture people will want to interact with this new sensation. This weightlessness is the reason for paying £200,000, so do you want to be wearing something normal? Or do you want to be clad in a garment that comes alive in these precious minutes and reacts in a completely new way to the weightless environment.

Fashion has always explored new concepts and in the context of space, we can look back to amazing 30’s characters including Flash Gordon, 50’s science fiction films including “Forbidden Planet”, “Barbarella” and “Star Trek” in the 60’s, as well as fashion designers Courreges and Cardin, who in the excitement of the explosion of 60s space fever, explored new materials and silhouettes, to translate gravity laden mortals with some of the cachets and sparkles of space exploration.

The space fever died off and although space exploration continued throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s we never again hit that fertile, febrile excitement until now.

Space fever is about to hit the world again and what do we wear? Not just on Virgin Galaxy but on the inflatable space hotel being assembled as we speak that will orbit the earth by “Bigelow airspace” of Las Vegas and the Hilton hotel chain are looking at the design of a hotel on the moon as well as an orbiting space hotel called the galactic suite space hotel.

So what will the staff wear in a super expensive luxury hotel that is literally out of this world and what will the super rich wear when on holiday?

The answer lies in the hands of fashion designers who will create fashion garments that react to zero and microgravity in a new and completely different way to clothes that currently exist in a full gravity environment. This may involve jets of air, magnets, shape memory alloys, nano fibres and fabrics, infra red data streams, light, radiation, etc, to allow garments to work with the human body and the environment in a new and unique manner.