Humans have always had a fascination with futurism, gazing at the zenith as we imagine the other worldly atmospheres beyond our selves. Since the dawn of the space age, fashion has flirted with the galactic, but now as we face the climate emergency, the industry has a more pressing responsibility to do better for the planet we inhabit and any more yet to be explored. The costumes in science fiction films and books have an undeniable and far reaching influence on fashion, both couture and subcultures, and the new wave of innovative production methods and bio-diverse fabrics are born of where urgently needed sustainability and imagination intersect.
Much of sci-fi is shaped by the dystopian, post-apocalypse scenario, while others focus on a utopia, and costume designers often place emphasis on more uniform and functional clothing. Paco Rabanne’s designs on 1968’s Barbarella imagined clothing that took 1960s street style married with non-traditional fabrics to create silver bikinis and miniskirts which would inspire designers to send models down catwalks in metallics and bold geometric shapes. The 1960s saw the rise of more revealing clothing and it could be conceived that the future would be even more liberal when it came to showing skin in the 41st century, even if many other writers envisioned harsh climates and the needs for durable clothing. Rabanne would go on to say, “I defy anyone to design a hat, coat, or dress that hasn’t been done before. The only new frontier left in fashion is the finding of new materials,” something which is being explored at a rapid and fascinating pace.
Films such as Blade Runner (1982), and the Alien (1979-1997) series would go on to have a monumental impact on fashion. Vivienne Westwood openly said that Blade Runner as the inspiration for her 1988 show, and decades later it would continue to influence designers, particularly with much of the reboots of the film’s themes and costumes in new films and television series. H. R. Giger’s ingenious biomechanical creations for Alien were reimagined over and over by designers, as the absurd and dark future facing imagery was stitched into designs and replicated in subcultures such as the post-Goth cyber goth and cyberpunks. The costume design of Lubor Tokoš in 1958’s The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne, and more recently the inspired costuming of Jean-Paul Gaultier in 1995’s The City Of Lost Children were the stuff of steampunk dreams and the costumes are replicated in the subcultures merging of emulating Victorian and time travelling concepts. Another example of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s inspired costume design for The Fifth Element (1997) with bondage straps and slashed fabrics, was heavily incorporated in 1990s club culture as well as making existing traditionally underground counterculture detail, such as those used in goth and fetish scenes, break into couture styles.
Lee Alexander McQueen was at once brilliant, controversial, gifted, and troubled. He drew inspiration from the past, and nature, but much of his prowess was in his execution of how he predicted what the future would look like. Some of his most significant creations in the latter came in the AW99 season. As we cautiously entered the millennium with Y2K theories, and a year that was often thought to herald revolutionary societal changes by sci-fi writers of the past, McQueen’s collection foretold the bionic and otherworldly. The show saw models mirror robots, their bodysuits covered in carefully placed LED lights, cyborgs strutting down the catwalk, and a show that would go down in history. McQueen finished the show with one of fashion’s most celebrated and iconic moments when two automaton figures appeared from the beneath the stage and rotated in tandem with a model before spray painting her dress on the spot. He returned to the sci-fi theme with his SS10 show, Plato’s Atlantis—which made a powerful commentary on climate change, and later, was again referenced in his dark Horn Of Plenty show which was a damning and justified criticism of the fashion industry’s wasteful practices. In his 2009 show entitled Plato’s Atlantis, he predicted a post-apocalyptic world where melting ice caps condemned the world to life underwater. This theme is one that is the basis of many of the great sci-fi tropes and McQueen’s vision of this saw models set against a blue luminous backdrop, where his models depicted humans who had taken on reptile forms, evolved to have claws to adapt to the new age, and impossibly high hair styling echoing the prevalent images many have when we speak of aliens. Plato’s parable Atlantis tells of an ancient once utopian society that becomes morally corrupted, where wealth cruelly overrides ethics, engages in war, and is ultimately wiped by being submerged under the sea as a punishment for its ills. We see this idea as a basis of many science fiction stories, and as a reality faced by the world at large, and clothing, should we face the inevitable “terrible event” that has been ruminated on by scientists and authors on for much of time, be that nuclear war, disease, environmental disaster, or the threat of AI.
While styling based on sci-fi has been a staple in fashion for some time, there is another element now emerging in the sourcing and production of clothing once only dreamed of in the fiction genre. Techniques such as laser cutting, 3D printing, and digitally printed clothing are creating waves. Iris Van Herpen, the creative force behind many of fashion’s triumphs, merging science with the divinely inspired, was the first to create a 3D printed dress and her work since has incorporated fantastical futuristic designs with the repurposing of non-traditional materials. The prophetic guru of cyberpunk William Gibson has dabbled in fashion in collaboration with designer label Buzz Rickson’s and also acts as a consultant Arc’teryx Veilance, a label who merge minimalist designs with advanced technological construction methods that respond to the climate. Gibson made a point of elaborating on the details of the fashion worn by his characters, as opposed to much of the writing, which he thought didn’t dwell too deeply into the matter, and was overly reliant on the concept of uniformity. Wind the clock back to the 1930s when nylon was invented and other synthetic fabrics were coming into use, the race for new developments in production would become a source for sci-if writing. 1951’s film The Man In The White Suit centred around a scientist who seeks to create an indestructible fabric whose invention could transform dependency on material production but is eventually dismissed with profit being prioritised. Sci-fi characters frequently have to adapt and develop new materials, and where much of the imagining of these in previous decades were rooted in the challenges of their times such as wartime fabric rationing, labour, and costs, we’re now having to create new fabrics to delay the bleak future of climate emergencies as predicted by environmentalists.
Organic and engineered fabrics are common elements in sci-fi writing as are the means of production. We see characters make clothing that responds to shifting climates, threats, armours, and nanofabrics we’ve only been developing since 2000 to withstand the challenges the characters face. Writers can but imagine fashion in the future, and while some of it is based on a fabric’s benefits, risks of scarcity, and the ever-in-flux fashion trends, we’re now at a time where new advancements in the production methods are a fertile ground for the sci-if genre’s new authors. The designer Issey Miyake established a research agency and has made exceptional advancements in technologies for garment construction. These include A-Poc, where a garment is made all at once from a tube of fabric rendering the traditional stitching methods obsolete. Spray-on fabrics such as Fabricon, bond and create clothing as it dries, removing sizing issues in sewing and are easily repaired. Where the frequent use of uniforms in sci-fi often relates to this idea of rankings in some or all citizens as equal in others, perhaps another source of costume writing will rise from the fascinating evolving and advancing construction methods. Some of these have been written about extensively, but we now have the means that can be expanded upon in the science fiction projections of how humans will create clothing in times to come.
Exciting recent developments in biofabrics such as mushroom, cactus, coconut, and algae leathers and fabrics, while sadly coming from a time when there is an urgent necessity to reduce the fashion industry’s devastating impact on the planet, are showing us that the future is here. Indeed, algae materials crops up in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode “The Terratin Incident” (1973) when the crew of the Starship Enterprise are wearing uniforms made of fXenylon, a fabric synthesised from algae which had come to be recognised for its benefits in the 1970s. Since the 1930s in sci-fi, there have been repeated references to synthetic spider silk, playing on a widely held arachnophobia, as well as a race for new materials that are organic in both the fictional future and present. This fabric appears in Misfit by Robert Heinlein(1939), 1967’s All Laced Up by George Whitely (1939), Diane Maples’ The Personal Touch (1993), and in Geoffrey Landis’ 2010 The Sultan Of The Clouds. Since 2007, a Japanese company called Spiber have been developing lab grown spider silk, which much like its fantasy costumes needs, has the lightness and durability required although initial issues encountered were related the shrinking when met as spider webs do which have since been successfully overcome. Engineered materials from organic materials would occur in shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, and, of course these are preceded by the materials distilled from sweat as used in 1965’s epic Dune created by Frank Herbert. A more unusual bio fabric to be invented in recent times are the crystals derived from human sweat as developed by Alice Potts. The process involves removing sweat from clothing which through her innovative lab techniques can crystallise in a matter of hours, making a more sustainable sourcing of these for garment embellishments. The biofabrics trade is one of the most rapidly advancing technologies, and once only within the realms of science fiction.
Fashion students are being trained now with a focus on future proofing and environment hazards being implemented in their courses. There are arts and science universities across the world that are running courses on designing the Mars spacesuit which stands as proof as to how students are being trained to not just look past traditional fabrics, but also beyond the planet in transforming the face of fashion as we know it. The pioneering science fiction costuming is interwoven into both styles and science as we design expressive canvases for adorning the body in this time period and in the future in ways only once only conceptualised in forward thinking fantasy novels. We see in multiple science fiction examples for those that survive on a devastated planet, wars for scarce resources where clothing has to be battle ready, and made from anything left that can be fashioned beyond what we know. In others, humans are exploring new planets where materials are developed from vegetation, and when extraterrestrial aliens wear clothing radically different to humans, an exploration of other cultures’ dress styles as the authors knew them at the time of their writing either in more widely accessed anthropology ethnographic descriptions, wartime depictions of the strange enemies, and the new influxes of other nationalities when there were rises in immigration. Aliens are the ultimate symbol and archetype of the other, and their physical features and clothing act as a connotation of life and the needs of existence in unknown galaxies. For some writers, the future generations’ robes reference ceremony and conjure depictions of monks and samurais from previous centuries—the simplicity, the reverence, and the rituals observed in multiple religions since their origins, both suited for fighting and those that are the noble peacemakers. For many the reimagining of military uniforms takes form from WW2 concepts and others borrow from the running themes of the wild west cowboys and outlets.
We are living in unprecedented times and survival, sustainability, and repurposing are the key driving factors in fashion and materials production. Much of early sci-fi scenarios are our present reality and many acknowledge its potential for the not so distant future. What that means for fashion has yet to be established, but the for now it’s a defining factor we must consider as we move forward.