MODA / FASHION
FOTO: Profimedia.rs / Robyn Beck / AFP
DESIGNERS’ OBSESSION WITH FUTURISM
viously considered wearable. In the decades that followed, many designers soared to stardom through creative research, from the famous Robot woman dressed in metal and moulded Perspex in Thierry Mugler's vision of the 1990s, to the kind of Tron- and Terminator-inspired gold leggings that Nico- las Ghesquière created in 2007, during his tenure as cre- ative director at fashion house Balenciaga. Ghesquière returned to that inspiration for his 2022 resort collec- tion for Louis Vuitton, where he currently works, im- plementing futuristic stitching and prints of sketches of planets and sci-fi landscapes. He created a maximalist wardrobe for journeying into a future without gravity. Alexander McQueen was obsessed with Blade Runner and used its wealth of motifs for his au- tumn-winter 1998 collection for Givenchy, where he was then creative director, following the exam- ple of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, who used footage from the film as prints for their Spring 1983 Punkature collection. For some crea- tors – such as Dolce & Gabbana and Versace – outer space is marked by Flash Gordon kitsch. For others, like Hussein Chalayan, it is presented as an intel- lectual challenge in line with that which Tarkovsky
The sky isn’t the limit, fashion is in outer space Although it seems like a millennial trend, fashion designers from New York to Tokyo have been drawing inspiration from the universe for decades.
E verything started in the 1960s, when the famous trio of Parisi- an avant-garde style comprising Paco Rabanne, André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin presented their futuristic collections of reduced silhouettes in fabrics with glinted metallic reflections and plastic accessories. The recently departed Pierre Cardin spent most of his career on the framework of those tendencies, as a true modernist inspired si- multaneously by the architecture, interior de- sign and functional design of NASA, fearless in his use of unconventional materials and details. Cardin didn’t observe outer space from the prism of its artistic vision, he went directly to NASA to explore the possibilities of shifting the boundaries of what was pre-
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