Editor’s Note: This story has been amended from an earlier iteration published at the time of the 2024 total solar eclipse.
“We choose to go to the Moon,” said President John F. Kennedy in 1962, and we haven’t stopped opting in since America’s first lunar landing. Now Prada is headed there via a collaborative project with NASA.
Designers’ fascination (or should that be fashination?) with the Great Beyond dates to the mid-’60s when Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, and Paco Rabanne, created out-of-this-world get-ups for starry-eyed earthlings. Their silver-and-white Space Age aesthetic set the template for futurism in fashion. White, as the BBC reports, actually has functionality for astronauts; it reflects radiation and allows for “visibility even in the darkness of Earth’s shadow.”
The looks assembled here, almost all from runways, are not intended to be hidden, but to make the wearer as memorable as a blazing comet. There are voluminous moon-walker puffers, to be sure, but also body-con and aerodynamic one-pieces, and flowing robes worth of Princess Leia, plus Dune-style draping and not-to-be-missed fluorescence. Technology is represented in the form of computer-chip prints and embroideries, and the sun, moon, stars, and planets are in constant rotation pattern-wise. Designers including Nicolas Ghesquière, Alexander McQueen, and Iris van Herpen, have made many repeat journeys of imagination into the new, blue frontier, and returned with suggestions for our well-dressed future selves. Feel free to explore.
Jennifer Turcios contributed additional image research for this story.
