This year NASA launched a website dedicated to a public vote on their next generation of space attire. The website offered a selection of three spacesuits, inspired by principles of biomimicry and trends in wearable technology.¹ These are the latest in NASA’s Z-series of spacesuits. The previous suit, the Z-1, was named one of Time magazine’s best inventions of 2012, thanks to its ground-breaking application of 3D printing in the formation of impact-resistance structures.² This design was lauded primarily due to its innovative functionality. The new design, the Z-2, incorporates similar technologies and, crucially for voters, it also looks stylish.

In terms of basic structure and functionality, the three designs offered to voters are identical, differentiated only by superficial aesthetic elements. One of the designs, titled the ‘Biomimicry’ suit, contains an electroluminescent wire which decorates the suit in low lighting conditions. Another competing design, the ‘Technology’ suit incorporates a bold chest insignia, and the ‘Trends in Society’ suit – the most overtly aesthetic design of them all with its contrast stitching – is reflective of what every day clothes may look like in the not too distant future and takes inspiration and design elements from sportswear.

The superficiality of these choices invites questions about limits to the audience’s expertise and the importance of aesthetics in an increasingly commercialised field. NASA have had to negotiate the conflict between the value of audience engagement with the fact that few audience members are qualified to make judgements about the suitability of spacesuits for extra-terrestrial environments. It is reasonable to assume that most voters have no experience of space travel, and are far less qualified than NASA employees to make informed decisions about the functionality of any particular spacesuit. Therefore, in order to offer voters an ostensibly significant level of audience involvement, their influence must be restricted to superficial aesthetic elements, forced NASA designers to consider the factor of ‘style’.

The consequence of this vote is that NASA suits are beginning to incorporate elements of fashion. It has become necessary for the suits to mirror trends in contemporary fashion design, drawing on trends for vibrant colours and sportswear, combined with visions of the future in recent sci-fi film costumes.

Functional aspects of the suit are, arguably, more essential than aesthetic aspects, however, in the eye of the untrained beholder, it is naturally the stylistic aspects that differentiate one design from another. It is this apparent importance of style, in contrast to the actual importance of functionality, which gives votes the impression of power and control. Historically-held notions about the ‘nobility of sight’ have caused audiences to assume the primacy of visual features, stylistic decisions may therefore appear more important than they actually are, giving voters the impression that they are contributing significantly to the future of space exploration.

Further questions are raised about why the general public are more qualified to make decisions about fashion than about technology. Why is it that a layperson is trusted to select an element of style but not an element of utility? Style, like all fashion, is essentially concerned with surface decoration, and often accused of being frivolous.³ The suit serves its purpose regardless of its appearance. NASA’s invitation to voters is therefore essentially worthless to astronauts, but vital to the public perception that they are engaging with their audience. In an increasingly commercialised industry, NASA must stay ahead of the game not just in technical innovation but also in terms of public image. They must present themselves alongside reality television and the numerous other commercial ventures that use public votes to direct their decisions, prompting a reflection on the value of public opinion and appeal when science meets fashion.

Barbara Brownie is a researcher and writer. She is also lecturer in fashion history and theory at the University of Hertfordshire.

1. Holpuch, Amanda. ‘Nasa says new spacesuit one small step towards sending mankind to Mars,’ The Guardian [online]. Accessed 30 April 2014,  http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/30/nasa-spacesuit-zseries-new-design-mars ↩

2. NASA, ‘The NASA Z-2 Suit’, 2014. http://jscfeatures.jsc.nasa.gov/z2/ ↩

3. Roche, Daniel and Birrel, Jean. ‘The Culture of Clothing’. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp.502 ↩

***

I am assuming that you are now ten years old and that, therefore, in another ten years (when you are reading this letter) you will be twenty. I do not want you to read it now, because clothes do not yet mean very much to you, although if you are a normal little girl, as I am sure that you are, they already mean something. You already know the thrill of the ‘party frock’; but for ordinary work and play you prefer something more practical and less easily soiled. You do not yet submit very willingly to the discipline of finery: you do not realise that il faut souffrir pour être belle.

I have called you Susan, but there are other names you might equally have been called Gillian, or Shirley, or Jane, or Bridget, or Judith, or Patricia Ann. You might have been called Pamela, or Ruth, or Sally, or Alison, or Caroline, or Pricilla, for all these names were exceedingly popular when you were brought into the world. But you couldn’t by any chance have been called Maud, or Elaine, or Daisy, and you were not very likely to be called Marjorie, or Eileen, or Doreen, for those names were out of fashion when you were born. And names, especially girl’s names, follow a well-marked cycle of fashion. They filter down, like clothes, through the social classes, and become in time a little dowdy, so that nobody likes to clothe their children in them, until the wheel comes full circle and all the old names come in again. When I was a little boy only grandmothers were called Jane, and only aunts were called Maud. Now one’s little nieces are called Jane and perhaps their children will be called Maud.

***

I want you to think of me as a rather elderly uncle. I am not elderly yet (at least in my own eyes) but I shall be by the time you are reading this letter. Or, if you like, you can think of me as an old astrologer bending over his books and looking through a telescope of his own construction at the wheeling stars. Actually I am in a Museum, and have been for the last quarter of a century, but to your young eyes the difference between a museum official and an astrologer is so slight that you would hardly notice it. Just think of me as a man with some knowledge of the Past, an acute interest in the Present, and an incurable curiosity about the Future. I am purposely playing into your hands. By post-dating my letter ten years, and by forbidding you to red it until 1956, I am trying to treat ten years of the Future as if it were already in the Past, and giving you ample opportunity of seeing how wrong I was and how little claim I have to be writing this letter at all.

I can’t help it. Speculating about the Future is one of my hobbies, and I am especially fond of speculating about the Future of Clothes. For I am one of those who think history is a continuous process, in spite of all its ups and downs, its catastrophes and revelations; and that if one can really understand the Past one can say something worth saying about the future also, and even make some contribution to the understanding of the incomprehensible present.

***

There is no doubt, I think, that the mere idea of clothes has a certain emotional significance for most women, so that even to talk about them, even to read about them (even if there is no possibility in buying) provides an unmistakable thrill. I am sure this is one of the reasons for the extraordinary success of fashion magazines ever since they were invented at the end of the eigthteenth century. They are purchased only partially for their guidance, their practical instructions. The real pleasure which women get out of them is to go into a kind of swoon – a hashish dream. But it is no good trying to find masculine equivalents or indeed any equivalents at all.

There is nothing more intimately part of ourselves than the clothes we wear and it often astonishes me that there is so little curiosity about them. If you venture to ask why they wear clothes at all, most people will think you are too mad to deserve a reply. If they do answer they are likely to say something about the English climate, or refer you with half a smile to the Garden of Eden.

With cloche hats and short skirts and universal beige every woman of a certain build looked like every other woman of the same build. Even their faces were made (and made-up) to look as much alike one another a possible. If you had asked any of those women why they she wore the clothes she did she would have replied that she did so entirely to please herself. Those particular clothes, she would have explained, were the clothes she happened to like the best. But why do all women “happen to like” the same clothes at the same moment?

A Letter to a Girl on the Future of Clothes by James Laver was published in 1946.