Maggie Davey On certain days when all is right with the world, and the sun tilts at a fine angle, it can make sense to know that Frank Sinatra’s favourite colour was orange. Or that practically every item in the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century had rounded edges and art deco design was a substitute for ergonomics and space safety. It may even make knowing that the style of dress that Genghis Khan liked his mistresses to wear was a short skirt made from the hides of field mice and that this resembled the prescription clothing of James Bond’s girlfriends, all worthwhile. At least for someone like myself, a child of the Seventies, reared at the pap of television and at the knee of consumerism, the urge to define the times by what I see on television is a hard habit to kick. So when Captain Kirk, Spock and legions of fellow travellers to the future wore shiny, figure-hugging jump suits, that visual imprint was left in my optical cortex. Which is why if you had to ask me what will we wear in 2050 or 2100, my reply would be:”Why, spandex or Lycra, of course.” Knowing that I would surely be gone by then would give me great comfort. Lycra or spandex is a construct of the late 1950s United States. Modern, appealing, and a fabric that can stretch to over five times its original size, it was developed by the giant US corporate daddy, Du Pont, in 1959, 10 years before the first Star Trek episode was commissioned by NBC and 20 years after Du Pont announced nylon to an exhausted post-Depression US at the 1939 World’s Fair. That’s the same Du Pont that manufactured gunpowder and dynamite in the 1800s and worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. While they were busy with plutonium they stopped production of nylon tights, preferring instead to manufacture nylon parachutes. (Incidentally, one of the Du Pont directors is a Mr Vest, which does rather pip Rand Water’s Mr Bath in the appropriate names stakes, but does not beat my favourite, Irish law firm, Argue & Phibbs.) When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, he wore a suit that was not figure hugging, but of the 25 layers of materials in his suit, 23 were made by Du Pont. As far as I know, no vox pop has been undertaken to discover what people think we will wear in the future, but chances are that the picture in people’s minds is more Buck Rogers than Neil Armstrong. Lorna Ross, principal research officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s European Media Lab and former fashion designer, spent three years working with the US Department of Defence, and most of that time with the Navy Seals. Her insights into the future of clothing reveal just how much what we wear is an often bizarre and complicated reflection of our environment.
“In the period of the Cold War,” she says,”the military establishment was operating in terms of MAD (mutually assured destruction), and it did not look at the needs of individual soldiers. The kit that soldiers wore until the early 1990s was virtually unchanged from what was worn during the Korean War.
“When the first troops went on peacekeeping missions to Bosnia and Sudan it became clear that they were badly equipped, and this is when the US military decided to research what has become known as the 21st Century Soldier.” MIThril, the research platform at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that works on washable, non-shrink computing, has developed memory glasses, which provide a context (in audio and in text) for the wearer. You know those social engagements where you are talking to someone and you cannot remember their name or anything about them? Well, memory glasses will recognise your discomfort and will project the important details on to the inside of your glasses. Social embarrassment will be a thing of the past, providing you don’t spill your drink or wet your knickers. And all thanks to the selfsame 21st Century Soldier. Ross however acknowledges that these developments exist on what she calls”a sliding scale of what is known as clothing, which on one side could be what we commonly call clothes, and on the other lies robotics and artificial intelligence. Here, the research is called’nano-bio’ and an example of this is sub-dermal implants, where atoms are configured so as to build intricate shapes which act as catalysts.” “Niggardly waists and niggardly brains go together,” wrote the suffragette Frances Willard.”A ligature around the vital organs at the smallest diameter of the womanly figure means an impoverished blood supply to the brain, and may explain why women scream when they see a mouse.” Full expression was given to this sentiment in the latter part of the 20th century when the women’s movement called on women to ditch restrictive clothing. However now, at the start of the 21st century, fashion historians have discerned the internalisation of the corset and”niggardly waists” in idealised women’s bodies. But restrictions in clothing do not necessarily mean restrictions in the mind, and vice versa. Social tensions change clothing styles, and in the post-September 11th world, the Taliban in Afghanistan were roundly and rightly chastised for their treatment of women, and once the first US troops arrived in Afghanistan the potent pictures of liberation were of Afghan women who had lifted their veils. But as Ross points out, if the freedom to dress how you please is an indication of real freedom and true emancipation, then how to explain the trammelled women of the West who still have not made it to the real tables of power? (Margaret Thatcher will always be the exception to the rule, but so presumably would female aliens from another planet.) And how to explain the tradition of powerful and achieving women in Iran who run some of Iran’s most important institutions? This dissonance that exists between what we wear and what makes sense to wear holds similarly for the story of corsets, spandex, memory glasses and whatever else the future holds for us. It brings us back to the imagination, and how we soak up and expire cultural messages, sometimes without interrogation and often without dissent.