Examples of Fichon Examples of Fashion

Columbia Pictures / Warner Bros. / American Zoetrope / Annapurna Pictures

In science fiction movie theatre, costuming has an innate morality. Dauntless explorers wear astronaut white. The downtrodden but determined wear earth tones. Entry-level evil troops rely on the often-masked anonymity of uniformity. And villains, somehow, know to cover themselves in impenetrable materials — plastic, metal, heavy-duty leather — almost always rendered in black.

That it's ofttimes and then screamingly obvious is, for sci-fi fans, office of the fun: aesthetic choices have symbolic implications, ones that can be parsed without too much difficulty. But there are diminishing returns to the approach. In 1971, with THX 1138, George Lucas created a dystopian fascist futurity society and dressed its oppressed underclass in all white to symbolize their lack of individuality. And it was beautiful. When Michael Bay pulled a whiteout with The Island in 2005, it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, sexed up and dumbed down. By the time of this year'due south niggling seen Kristen Stewart sci-fi romance Equals, suppression emblematized by an all-white wardrobe felt like cringe-inducing cliche.

Thankfully, though, not all recent sci fi and dystopia has fallen victim to unimaginative tropes. A small pack of filmmakers are using the genre's archetype use of sartorial symbolism in more nuanced, clever, inventive means.

Equals / Route 1 Films

Alex Garland'south 2013 picture Ex Machina is ready in a sprawling drinking glass and concrete structure surrounded by forestry that is past turns both lush and imposing. Information technology's where reclusive software CEO Nathan Bateman invites a seemingly-randomly-selected programmer, Caleb Smith, to meet the advances he's made in artificial intelligence. In the motion picture, the house functions as a vacuum for experiments that tinker with delicate moral issues. (In reality, it'due south a bazaar Norwegian hotel.) Says product designer Marking Digby, the location "had to exist welcoming and seducing but at the same time it likewise had to brand the states wary and slightly on border. Hard shiny surfaces are for the bad guys. Nosotros wanted to keep abroad from that, only nosotros wanted to however utilize information technology."

The hardest, shiniest surface in Ex Machina is not its location but its antagonist: the humanoid dubbed Ava, whose poetically beautiful face is offset past the residuum of her trunk — mesh overlaying circuitry, wires, and metal plates. As Ava'south seduction of the gullible Caleb intensifies, luring him into a fantasy of a future together, she dresses slowly, piecemeal, donning a floral blouse with a pink cardigan and and so an A-line patterned apparel. These are almost parodies of feminine purity: the kind of wearing apparel girls vesture to church.

When Ava finds her way out into the real globe, her chosen ensemble is similarly saccharine: a demure white lace blouse with a peter pan collar and a fluted pencil skirt to friction match. It's a visual gag — sheep's wearable for the scheming, sociopathic Ava — as well as a sly commentary on how women all-time digest into modern club: past beingness good girls.

Ex Machina / Universal Pictures International

Ex Machina is set up in the not-so-distant time to come, where applied science and human cruelty have advanced just enough to actually fuck things upwards. Similarly positioned: "The Entire History of You," a 2011 episode of the brilliant British sci-fi series Black Mirror. The wearing apparel are sharp and gorgeous, the architecture stunning, the fact that humans now have the engineering to record everything that's ever happened to them admittedly terrifying. The episode'south elegant plot uses the memory-technology — called a "grain" — to put in motion the rapid dissolution of a handsome immature couple. Ultimately, all of their money and their taste does nothing to protect them from their memories.

Dissimilar those 2, the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos's 2016 moving-picture show The Lobster is set in a kind of parallel dystopian timeline, 1 where single men and women are carted off to a quaint seaside hotel with the sole objective of coming together a partner with whom they share even a modicum of compatibility (a penchant for nosebleeds, say, or sociopathy).

At bank check-in, the hotel'due south residents are asked to select an fauna; if they fail in their search for companionship, they're surgically reincarnated into their animal of choice. Equally in many dystopian films, the individuating elements of style take been removed from the societal equation. Men and women are stripped of their worldly belongings and given a uniform, which a voiceover calmly describes:

The men's article of clothing doesn't diverge from contemporary mode: collared shirts, sport coats, slacks and trousers. Simply the women'due south "essentials" are markedly gendered: they're mainly floral dresses in '40s silhouettes and shades of pastel. Equally in Ex Machina, cruelty is disguised by flowers and lace.

The Lobster / Film 4

The clothing thread between Ex Machina, The Lobster, and Black Mirror is that future wardrobe looks different plenty from our nowadays to be interesting merely not so different — not a single tunic to be constitute! — as to exist ridiculous. In that, they follow in the footsteps of 1997's Gattaca.

Getty Images / Handout

While the movie is purportedly set in "the not-also-afar future," Gattaca'due south eugenics and stringent, technologically-maintained class separation betwixt biometrically-discerned "valids" and "in-valids" suggest a timeline decades off from our own. The efforts Ethan Hawke's in-valid Vincent Freeman takes to surpass his station while assuming the identity of the valid just crippled Jerome Eugene Morrow are remarkably advanced. Meanwhile, the clothing in the Gattaca universe is an inherently recognizable synthesis of archetype Americana. Valids vesture simple suits or brim suits to work; Jerome wears a rumpled collared shirt with a tweed vest, a cigarette dangling from his lips. And when Uma Thurman'south character hits the town, she does it in a silver lamé halter wearing apparel, looking remarkably similar to 1940's femme fatale moving-picture show star Veronica Lake.

Gattaca's costume designer Colleen Atwood (a three time Oscar award-winner) sourced and reconfigured men's suits from the '30s and '80s to create what has since been heralded equally a costuming triumph, likewise as a sheathing of '90s minimalist chic. "I could dress that way myself," Atwood said of the film'south wardrobe, "in that it'southward urban timelessness, almost like a compatible."

Bract Runner / Warner Bros.

The equation of uniformity with futurism has its roots in the industrial revolution, but as CUNY Professor Eugenia Paulicelli explains in her essay "Style and Futurism: Performing Dress," mass simplicity in fashion can be seen as a reaction to the kind of avant-garde creative designs birthed by futurist movements like French surrealism, Russian constructivism, and German Bauhaus.

Those fashions, Paulicell writes, "deliberately sought to effect a rupture with the by and present in society to achieve a completely new fashion of looking at dress and appearance in public and private spaces, underlining the lack of symmetry, the combination of opposite elements and material." If guild's trajectory is towards the homogenized and regimented, an adherence to those systems will exist reflected by a simplicity of apparel. In other words: accept your fascist overlords and dress like anybody else. Or rebel, and article of clothing the crazy shit.

Blade Runner / Warner Bros.

Ridley Scott's Bract Runner is another movie that found its aesthetic voice, in role, by looking backwards. The 1982 adaptation of Philip Thousand. Dick's Exercise Androids Dream of Electrical Sheep? is set up in the at present non-so-startling year of 2019. Ultra-urban and reeking of course carve up, Los Angeles has evolved into a nightmarish, artificial mural devoted to advertizing (a vision not unfamiliar to anyone who's recently visited Times Square), where humanoid robots — chosen replicants — are segregated by their designated office in society to serve the human population's interests.

Some replicants, however, don't concord to the servitude. They're seen in translucent vinyl trench coats, artificial snake scales as facial decor, leather dusters with exaggerated collars, and black mesh minidresses.

So there's Sean Young'south replicant character, Rachael, who believes she is human, and is all the more sympathetic for information technology. Her style is an amalgamation of 1940's pic star cliches: her pilus is an elaborate, precise waved pompadour, her modest skirt suits have exaggerated proportions and nipped-in waists, and her carmine lipstick is immaculate. Our hero, Rick Deckard — a bounty hunter, famously played past Harrison Ford — is a direct descendent of Raymond Carver'southward Philip Marlowe, a hard-boiled detective in a rumpled trench coat start brought to life past Humphrey Bogart in 1939'south The Large Sleep.

It'south a clean split: the bad guys wear the creepy "futuristic" stuff; the good guys get to wear classic pieces. The familiarity of Deckard and Rachael'due south clothing emphasizes their humanity — or, in Rachel's case — their perceived humanity.

Her / Annapurna Pictures

We see that dystopian filmmaking takes on a incomparably more than believable tone when information technology acknowledges that style, unlike technology, does not exclusively move forwards. That can be the key to great the veneer of an imagined future, making information technology more relatable, and ultimately more affecting. One recent moving picture, to a higher place all, has nailed the await of futurism by looking both frontwards and dorsum.

In Spike Jonze'due south 2013 film Her, Joaquin Phoenix'due south Theodore Twombly falls in beloved with Samantha — a disembodied, Siri-esque operating system. In the movie, both men and women dress in muted silhouettes that downplay their sexuality and suggest a kind of intellectual seriousness. In the nearly memorable variation of his standard outfit, Twombly wears round tortoiseshell frames, high-waisted tweed pants that fasten around his belly push, and a bright carmine push button-down whose pocket he has endearingly modified with a safety pin to allow his smartphone to "see" the globe every bit he does.

In a 2014 interview with the New York Times, Her'south costume designer Casey Storm explained that imagining sartorial futurism tin can be as elementary equally subtraction: "I'm realizing this retroactively. What a lot of futuristic films do and we didn't, is add things. No epaulets, badges, materials, textures. Those are things you look at the entire film going 'That's the futurity. That's the compatible.' What we did instead was have things away … We don't have whatsoever denim or belt buckles or ties or baseball hats. Nosotros barely accept a collar or lapel. The waistlines are all higher."

Those high waistlines became unforgettable, and helped catapult Spike Jonze'southward meditation on technology and desire in the not-so-far-future squarely into a dialogue with fashion's nowadays. They sparked call up pieces and trend pieces about sustainability and utility. They also served as the linchpin of an Opening Ceremony sheathing collection inspired by Storm's designs — the modern-day christening of "cool."

"Her" Collection / Opening Ceremony

In Her, morality is greyness-scale: hither, humanity is as much its own enemy every bit the technology it has created. And vesture is not assigned a designation of "adept" or "bad"; symbolism is stripped away. That leaves us to recognize the clothing options in the earth of Her as role of a tapestry of tiny choices that is by turns nostalgic, anxiety-provoking, self-destructive, and hopeful. Just like real life.

These days filmmakers are increasingly apropos themselves not with cold and afar galaxies just with the ambiguity of our almost-future. Maybe information technology'southward considering we don't need monsters: our addictive dependence on manus-held devices, the looming man-made ecology catastrophe, the cruelty of the internet — they're all nightmarish enough. In the worlds of Her, Black Mirror, and Ex-Machina, the sci-fi wardrobes are clever and lovely, yes. Simply they're also something more than —a reminder of how close we are to the border.

Trending

Share this post