Why Futuristic, Sci-fi Fashions Are Back Again

The future always seems to be a good look — especially when the present is tense and uncertain.

“Perhaps it is our wish to envision some type of utopian world, where the precision of numbers is realized as a visual purity,” Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture at the Brooklyn Museum, responded when asked to account for the recurrent popularity of sci-fi style.

It certainly came roaring back on fall 2024 runways, including at Rick Owens, Junya Watanabe, Dion Lee and Louis Vuitton, where eerie spotlights loomed overhead the glass pavilion venue, like UFOs scouting a place to land.

Many designers also winked to the original Space Age designers of the ’60s — Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Rudi Gernreich — and paraded fashions that might be described as retro-futuristic.

Other designers and brands frequently or occasionally associated with a futuristic look — be it dystopian or hopeful — include Coperni, Iris Van Herpen, Balenciaga, Mugler, Fendi and Stéphane Rolland.

“Aesthetically there are multiple futures, such as a post-industrial Rick Owens ‘Bladerunner’-esque world as well as a minimalist Jil Sander world, and the huge blur between the extremes,” Yokobosky said in an interview. “In our contemporary time zone, the 1960s era is timeless and is a constant in fashion design.”

Owens summed up his fall 2024 look as “cashmere spacesuits to wear in a concrete spaceship. That’s been an aesthetic that I’ve been pushing for a long time.”

In fact, Owens traces his fascination with futuristic imagery back to when he was a child playing with Lego as his father would read aloud novels by “Tarzan” creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, including “A Princess of Mars” and “The Moon Maid.”

He vividly recalls gazing up at the cover illustrations by Frank Frazetta, which “had this glam carnality that stuck with me: flying hair, lots of muscles, and Jugendstil-ish jewelry on half-naked princesses and jeweled monsters.”

Later he would discover books on black-and-white movies in his father’s library, “which is where I must have seen my first images of not only Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis,’ but also another movie of his, ‘Die Nibelungen,’ which I probably based my whole aesthetic on.”

Asked why he finds sci-fi futurism such an appealing universe, he replied: “I think the appeal is about a heroic fight for survival in an uncertain, unknown void with utopian possibilities. It’s something every generation facing adversity can daydream about… and the awareness of that being a daydream gives it a poignant camp quality.”

Yokobosky echoed the sentiment.

“I think it would be fair to say that every age has had its dreamers, from the Egyptians, to the Incas, to the Italian futurists of the early 20^th century, to every country who has developed a program to explore the space beyond Earth today,” he said.

In fact, Cardin, Courrèges, Gernreich, Rabanne and also Larry LeGaspi, who inspired a 2019 Rick Owens collection, “all sought to create new approaches to dressing in the era defined by NASA, when everyone thought a new future was beginning — as if the world of ‘The Jetsons’ was going to be our reality in short measure,” Yokobosky said.

In her most recent collection, Van Herpen drew inspiration from the futuristic, partially submerged laboratories and pavilions envisioned by French architect and oceanographer Jacques Rougerie.

“The future always represents this free space that has a lot of magnetism towards my own imagination,” the Dutch couturier said in an interview. “So much is known from our past, not everything, but then the future is this carte blanche which you can influence still. It really opens up my imagination.”

That said, Van Herpen stressed that she is not obsessed with sci-fi, the past also being a key influence. “So it’s a dialogue, I think — the way they influence each other. I find that really inspiring.”

Technology is another important element for the designer, who has always worked with traditional couture techniques alongside cutting-edge methods like 3D printing and silicon molding.

“Within a lot of sci-fi stories, there’s beautiful imagination on how technology can be used, and also important warnings,” she said. “I think we tend to trust in progress, always. So that’s sort of a natural trust that we often have in technology to make our lives better… But we have to be critical towards how we use it.

“I mean, you can use technology very creatively, and obviously, that’s my own focus,” she continued. “But it’s also a very powerful tool to control and that’s a very, very dominant aspect that we should not overlook.”

Van Herpen takes inspiration from myriad sources, including nature, science, architecture, literature and dance. Inspiring works in a sci-fi vein include the book series “The Three-Body Problem” and films including “Ghost in the Shell” and “Arrival,” in which “language is merged with the visual patterns. I think that’s really beautiful.”

But the designer stressed that she could not have created her aesthetic without a combination of artisanal techniques and cutting-edge technology. “It’s more than a design process alone. It’s really a process of discovery,” she said.

“Sci-fi is always about the promise of something — sometimes dystopian, but it could also be a good future, too,” said Nicolas Ghesquière, who has long had a penchant for futurism, parading robot leggings back in his Balenciaga days and constructing extraterrestrial or space-station sets for his massive shows at Vuitton.

His fashions are indeed of an empowering ilk, for “heroines of science fiction, but also heroines of the everyday; heroines in the street.”

Cutting-edge technology and sci-fi dreams are embedded in the DNA of Coperni, whose Paris runway shows have featured Bella Hadid in a spray-on dress, Boston Dynamics’ robot dogs and, for fall 2024, the mysterious black slab that originally appeared in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in a show that riffed on UFOs.

“Sébastien does not read the biography of Christian Dior; he reads the biography of Steve Jobs,” Arnaud Vaillant, who founded Coperni with designer Sébastien Meyer, said in a Zoom interview.

“The essense of our job is to create clothes for the future,” Meyer piped in. “This is what science fiction is about — predicting the future.”

The Coperni designer said he’s not surprised so many designers are leaning in a futuristic direction. “We are living in a world that is so difficult, with all the crises, the wars, etc. Why we are all into sci-fi is because we want to escape this world. We want to escape reality and create our own reality.”

What’s more, in Meyer’s view, fashion is “very late getting into technology and innovation because the past few years were very much into vintage, nostalgia.”

According to Vaillant, there is fervent interest in the intersection of fashion and technology, evident in viral interest on TikTok about Coperni’s latest gobsmacking version of its signature Swipe bag, using a NASA nanomaterial called silica aerogel, which is essentially 99 percent air and 1 percent glass.

Coperni sold three of the conceptual bags, which weigh 33 grams and cost 15,000 euros.

Sometimes, futurism can creep into a designer’s work unintentionally, which seems to be the case with Junya Watanabe’s fall 2024 collection, intended to “express the beauty of the contrast between clothes and sculptures.”

Indeed, stiff geometric contraptions based on square pyramids, tors and more amorphous shapes orbited the designer’s fine tailoring and dressmaking.

“I created this collection with the feeling that it would be beautiful if clothes like this kind of object existed in our daily life — similar to the public art movement that happened in the past,” the Japanese designer said in an email.

Yet he said it found it “very interesting” that his show gave off some sci-fi/futuristic vibes.

“I feel like the fact that I have such visual images in my memory is subconsciously influencing me, especially because I love sci-fi movies,” he enthused. “I feel attracted to extraordinary fantasy and to the beauty that exists in places that are extremely different from the ordinary. I think that science fiction and futuristic inspirations are one of the sources that stir emotions in fashion.”

Law Roach, the image architect, surely evoked awe and wonder when he dressed Zendaya in a vintage Thierry Mugler robot outfit for the London premiere of “Dune: Part Two” last February.

He called the chrome and plexiglass jumpsuit from Mugler’s fall 1995 collection “hands-down one of the greatest examples of futurism… and one of the biggest looks of my career so far.”

To be sure, it unleashed a viral frenzy, generating $13.3 million in Media Impact Value, according to data from Launchmetrics.

“What gives us the most joy is that we know the choices that we make, and the looks that we select entertain people and start conversations,” Roach said. “There were a lot of happy people inside fashion and outside of fashion that really got a thrill from watching her wear that incredible, incredible archive piece.”

For Zendaya’s other stops on her “Dune” tour, Roach selected looks from Stéphane Rolland, Juun.J, Roksanda, Louis Vuitton, Alaïa and vintage Givenchy from Lee Alexander McQueen’s “Tron”-inspired fall 1999 collection.

Roach said he personally relates to the look of tomorrow and often wears Rick Owens. “He’s the king of modern, sci-fi futurism, in my opinion,” he said. “If we’re talking about dressing in a way that feels futuristic, I think that look is really powerful.”

Lang’s “Metropolis” is a recurring inspiration for many fashion designers — even Max Mara and Delpozo have referenced the cult 1927 film — and Yokobosky is hardly surprised.

“It’s a great example of the man/machine dichotomy, that humans will be replaced by robots, a storyline that continues into our world via ‘Terminator 2’ and our current struggles with AI,” he said. “And so the polished, gleaming surfaces fascinate us as symbols of what we can never become, as we have a mind, memories and flaws.”