Why Aren't We Dressed for The Future?

I was promised silver jumpsuits.

I’m very guilty of a very backward-looking sense of style. I’m trend averse, vintage fuelled and all of my icons of style are mostly from the 1970s and 80s. But overall, there is a distinct lack of outwardly ‘futuristic’ clothing in everyday fashion, instead we’re plagued by which era of styles history is going to be plunged for the next interesting look, and fashion enthusiasts writ-large are on a seemingly constant hunt to be the one to find the epitomising archive image of a celeb that will prove to peers that ‘look, this is it! this is what we’re looking back at next!’.

Over the past 6 months or so there’s been rumblings of a return of skinny jeans, spurred on by a so-called revival of the ‘indie sleaze’ aesthetic that the likes of Charli XCX and The Dare are sort of spearheading. Like every new wave of interesting clothes, the idea is being packaged up and delivered to our feeds in a digestible parcel. I frankly can’t go back to a world where skinny jeans are the pervasive ‘cool’ silhouette, after years of comfort in wider shapes I’m just not going to do it when the inevitable resurgence does happen. It has me thinking, though, where are the new ideas? Where are the truly novel aesthetics that don’t look like anything else we’ve worn before?

'00s Indie Sleaze posterboy Pete Doherty, and 2024 Indie TikTok sound maker The Dare

Perhaps this is simply due to the fact that the ‘indie sleaze’ burgeoning revival is the first time I can think of where a style and trend that I was part of is now being discovered by the next generation (I’m turning 30 in a couple of weeks and the existentialism is getting to me), and perhaps I’m now just experiencing what my parents did when I started wearing clothes that were popular in their youth, and thus I’m just now the old man shouts at clouds meme and what’s ‘it’ is now longer with me.

I think back to an exhibition at the V&A a couple of years ago that telegraphed the history of menswear, and the section on the 1960’s that was, for lack of a better word - space age. Silhouettes were different and completely contrasted the suiting and casual wear that the decade before it had. I think about the Captain Scarlet looking outfits of Pierre Cardin and the suiting that was seen on The Beatles and how genuinely different it looks to even things we’re wearing now, which is kind of what men have worn for decades?

Pierre Cardin fit on the left, classic tailoring on the right, obviously.

We live in a time of genuine societal anxiety, the world around us is increasingly unknowable and looming. Climate collapse, class division, pandemics. All these things don’t exactly instil a hopeful attitude overall. Contrast that to the 1960’s post-war, space-faring, free love (at least that’s what they show in da movies) and it’s a bit easier to understand why designers nowadays aren’t exactly wanting to carve out a vision of a future that might not come, vs Cardin and his dismissal of conventional clothing in a world where the next revolution could well be living on the Moon.

When times are uncertain, reaching for a well-trodden item of clothing like some jeans or a big hoodie is maybe more appealing than something untested, like a smock that turns into a bag or something.

There are, of course, outliers. Brands that make clothes that are truly different, but until everyone is dressing in Issey Miyake, colour coded by their planet of residence, it still seems like we’re going to be looking to what’s come before, as opposed to what could be.