Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future and says, pretty sirens don't
Speaker 1: go flat. I'm Joe McCormick, I'm Lauren Bolgabon, and our
Speaker 1: regular host Jonathan Strickland is not with us today. He
Speaker 1: is being bored out of his mind on vacation. But
Speaker 1: instead we're being joined by our wonderful colleague and Pierre.
Speaker 1: Holly Fry. Introduce yourself, Holly, Hi, Hi, Hi. I'm Holly Fry,
Speaker 1: normally from Stuff You Miss in History Glass, an excellent
Speaker 1: podcast that if you don't already listen to, you should
Speaker 1: check out. Yeah, definitely, And Holly has been on the
Speaker 1: show before. At some point a long time ago. I
Speaker 1: believe Holly was with us, I think to talk about
Speaker 1: gamifying fitness, right, Yes, that was like October. We've been
Speaker 1: doing this a while and that kind of ties into
Speaker 1: our topic for today, which is fashion, the fashion of
Speaker 1: the future, the future of fashion. Specifically, we want to
Speaker 1: talk about whether in the future there will be literal
Speaker 1: fashion police armed with shock sticks and packs to chase
Speaker 1: down offenders who wear plaid jumpsuits. I don't know, there
Speaker 1: won't be no Well, Joan is gone, so the Fashion
Speaker 1: Police have all but disbanded. I don't know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Come along and will be The Fashion Police
Speaker 1: used to be a show that Joan Rivers headed up,
Speaker 1: where she would basically do that verbally described. She passed
Speaker 1: Kathy Griffin replaced her briefly, but then didn't really like
Speaker 1: the tone of the show because there was some you know,
Speaker 1: it's a little judge and negatives. Um so now it's
Speaker 1: kind of in a floundering and if anybody were going
Speaker 1: to start that branch of um, you know, legal actual
Speaker 1: chase you down and hurt you for your poor choices,
Speaker 1: it would have been Joan Rivers. What send. She's not
Speaker 1: with us anymore, although I have hope that like her
Speaker 1: brain is resting in a jar somewhere Futurama style, and
Speaker 1: that her her robot army will descend upon our dystopian
Speaker 1: future or utopian future. Really, I think that would work
Speaker 1: pretty well. So I imagine, Holly, you'd be a great
Speaker 1: defense counsel in the court of the Fashion Police, probably
Speaker 1: because I'm down for anything, right, So we we actually
Speaker 1: do want to talk about fashion today, maybe not fashion Police,
Speaker 1: but just more broadly the future of fashion. And we've
Speaker 1: talked about the future of clothing before. Yeah, in December
Speaker 1: we talked about stuff like kinetic fabrics and and three
Speaker 1: D printing of pieces, and self cleaning fabrics and odor
Speaker 1: filtering fabrics for all of your farts and um and
Speaker 1: and other stuff like that. Well, today we we brought
Speaker 1: Holly on because Ali actually does have a wonderfully interesting
Speaker 1: sense of fashion, and she designs things I do. I mean,
Speaker 1: I like clothes. I always have sin so I was
Speaker 1: a kiddo, like I don't remember ber not ever being
Speaker 1: into clothes and not making them. Yeah, yeah, And you
Speaker 1: make a lot of your own clothes, right, I do
Speaker 1: most of the unless it's a T shirt, it's a
Speaker 1: pretty safe bet that I made it. Except you make
Speaker 1: like really interesting clothes, not like the boring stuff I wear.
Speaker 1: Like you make like things for for like sci fi conventions,
Speaker 1: and I do. But I also make most of my
Speaker 1: day wear. Um. And part of that is because I don't.
Speaker 1: I never, even as a kid, liked what the offerings
Speaker 1: were off the rack, Like I didn't like wearing the
Speaker 1: same thing as other people. And it didn't have enough
Speaker 1: grito on it. Probably nothing ever has enough grito on it.
Speaker 1: Probably Do you have a grito tattoo? Does the world
Speaker 1: know this? I do, and the world knows, and the
Speaker 1: world will know more. We have a video coming out
Speaker 1: soon ish about me getting my grito tattoos, which will
Speaker 1: be on the House to Works YouTube channel. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I always was into kind of that crazy a lot
Speaker 1: of film inspired stuff and wanted to integrate that into
Speaker 1: my daily wear. So that's how I ended up kind
Speaker 1: of well, that's definitely where my brain and immediately goes
Speaker 1: when I think about the future of fashion. I just
Speaker 1: start thinking about, okay, sci fi movies set in the future,
Speaker 1: what do people wearing them? And immediately the first thing
Speaker 1: I think of is the fifth Element. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: why that is the movie that screams future? Yeah, who
Speaker 1: is that? I'm sorry, you're I hate. I hate to
Speaker 1: affirm stereotypes and be the guy in the room who
Speaker 1: doesn't know anything about fashion, but I don't. Well, we
Speaker 1: should also say that Jean Pagutier is not the only
Speaker 1: designer on it. Mobius also designed a lot of this.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. But Jean pau Gautier is a
Speaker 1: very well known French designer, as you might guess from
Speaker 1: the moniker Uh he does if you remember. This is
Speaker 1: a ways back for some of our younger listeners, though
Speaker 1: I'm sure they've seen them. Their iconic Madonna's tour where
Speaker 1: she did all the cone bras and those crazy corsets
Speaker 1: in the eighties, that was all Gautier. That's the future,
Speaker 1: it was then. Yeah, um, now you know those are
Speaker 1: just de rigor so yeah, well, I mean that is
Speaker 1: one vision of the future to me. The fifth element
Speaker 1: is interesting because it's got these sort of like wild,
Speaker 1: very eye catching and busy kind of fashion pieces, bright colors,
Speaker 1: strange patterns, things were not used to. But then the
Speaker 1: some depictions of the future sort of go in the
Speaker 1: totally opposite direction, right, Like you've got Star Trek and
Speaker 1: things like that, where they just say, well, in the future,
Speaker 1: nobody's gonna care about fashion and it's all just going
Speaker 1: to be identical jumpsuits or you know, basic gray fatigues. Well,
Speaker 1: but you're thinking about Star Trek in terms of the uniforms,
Speaker 1: because if you look at anybody else that gets on
Speaker 1: that ship, any any of the various alien cultures an encounter,
Speaker 1: although it seems like they default to jumpsuits and mumu,
Speaker 1: Well that's true. That's a very good point. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to remember that they're technically like a military crew.
Speaker 1: Military is maybe not the right way to place it,
Speaker 1: but there there is, you know, an exploration there are
Speaker 1: a governmental agency basically exploring space. So it's all uniform base, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you're part of an organization like Starfleet. Organizations
Speaker 1: like that, past, present and future always going to want
Speaker 1: to destroy your individuality and make you an identical peg.
Speaker 1: That's a fun way to look at it. I look
Speaker 1: at it is simplifying and codifying. You know, you have
Speaker 1: to make it easy to identify who's who and if
Speaker 1: you're allowed to where whatever you want. You won't know
Speaker 1: who the science officers are. Yes, you won't know which
Speaker 1: of the away party should die on the planet because
Speaker 1: they won't be wearing the red shirts, right right. I
Speaker 1: mean I'm personally really voting for like the golden age
Speaker 1: sci fi nineteen fifties version of future fashion, wherein all
Speaker 1: dudes where like deep ocean diving suits, and all ladies
Speaker 1: where like bikinis that are covered in vacuum sealed plastic wrap.
Speaker 1: I want lots of rings. I want ring collars everywhere.
Speaker 1: I want it to be very metropolis and a little
Speaker 1: bit of Do you remember when Futurama went to the
Speaker 1: bar where the rings were all the thing in terms
Speaker 1: of accessories and for I was like, oo futuristic and
Speaker 1: I'm like, no, this is retro. So I'm into that.
Speaker 1: I dig it. Pigs in space fashion forward. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: you bring up an interesting thing there, Holly, with retro
Speaker 1: and future sort of colliding, because a lot of people
Speaker 1: do seem to have observed that fashion goes in cycles, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: there is some argument over the length of the cycle,
Speaker 1: but yeah, for the most part, you'll hear people bandy
Speaker 1: about like the twenty year cycle. Uh. There was an
Speaker 1: article recently, I'm kind of pulling this one out of
Speaker 1: memory on Slate where they actually talked about a New
Speaker 1: Yorker article that discussed a forty year nostalgia cycle and
Speaker 1: that was in reference to Madmen and sort of how
Speaker 1: that has all happened. But they were using that juxtaposed
Speaker 1: against predictions and social observations of others, um other sociologists
Speaker 1: and predictors that would say there was a cycle. But
Speaker 1: they all gave them different year denominations. Oh no, it's
Speaker 1: a thirty years fifteen is really where the site no
Speaker 1: is more where the cyclist so well. But but but
Speaker 1: either way, it's it's easily observable in the fact that
Speaker 1: a lot of the things, uh, like, a lot of
Speaker 1: the things that the young hip kids these days are
Speaker 1: wearing seemed very similar to what was popular in like
Speaker 1: hip hop culture in the mid right, Uh, and that
Speaker 1: that does happen. There is an argument going on right
Speaker 1: now that the cycle is getting shortened by the you know,
Speaker 1: sort of permutation of technology in our lives and the
Speaker 1: compression apidity with which we share interestation now whereas before
Speaker 1: part of the twenty year cycle was like the big
Speaker 1: cities is where the retro stuff would start and then
Speaker 1: it would slowly ripple out to more and more rural
Speaker 1: areas until it became kind of ubiquitous. But now everybody's
Speaker 1: attached to everything at the same time. So interesting that
Speaker 1: happened is interesting. But what I wanted to bring up
Speaker 1: was Labour's law. He was a historian, among other things,
Speaker 1: and a journalist, and he sort of observed and wrote
Speaker 1: down this sort of uh, the cyclical nature of it
Speaker 1: and he broke it out in the year. So his
Speaker 1: sort of the way that he says the fashion timeline
Speaker 1: goes is that an item is considered indecent ten years
Speaker 1: before it's time, shameless five years before it's time, daring
Speaker 1: one year before it's time, smart when it's okorn, and
Speaker 1: that's smart in the sense of snappy, not intellect like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a she's a smart dresser. Uh dowdy one year
Speaker 1: after its time, hideous ten years after its time, ridiculous
Speaker 1: twenty years after its time, amusing thirty years after its time,
Speaker 1: quaint fifty years after its time, charming seventy years after
Speaker 1: its time, romantic one hundred years after its time, and
Speaker 1: beautiful one fifty years after its time. That's kind of
Speaker 1: a long I don't know if that's even a cycle.
Speaker 1: That's just sort of like a qualitative spectrum emerging from
Speaker 1: the present year. Yeah, And I had mentioned to Joe
Speaker 1: a little bit ago, and I did not put it
Speaker 1: in the notes because I had a revelatory moment while
Speaker 1: I was driving into work this morning, because I was
Speaker 1: thinking about this and I was trying to kind of
Speaker 1: retroactively apply these rules and be like, well, like a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago, we were kind of one
Speaker 1: of those shifts in Victorian fashion when the bustle skirt
Speaker 1: was very big, and I was like, well, that's never
Speaker 1: going to come back, and then my brain went Nicki
Speaker 1: Minaj and I was like, oh, it did come back,
Speaker 1: and now people are getting you know, dairy are implants
Speaker 1: so that they can make the badanc a little larger
Speaker 1: and more sumptuous, and it's basically a modernized version of
Speaker 1: a you know, like a bustle pad. That was the
Speaker 1: point of bustles, really was. That was the point of
Speaker 1: the crinolines. I thought it was like, so peoples and
Speaker 1: bustles are not the same thing. Okay, So the big
Speaker 1: the big dresses and big skirts. I always thought, and
Speaker 1: I could totally be wrong, that the point was that
Speaker 1: nobody's going to see the shape your leg moving the
Speaker 1: dress that way. And there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: reasons you can't really break it down to one. Like,
Speaker 1: for example, when you look at sort of the the
Speaker 1: wide pannier of like the Rococo period, like so think
Speaker 1: of a marianto a net dress and this really really
Speaker 1: exaggerated hip shapes, like like you can't fit through doorway
Speaker 1: unless you turn sideways right, right, And that was like
Speaker 1: the six ft diameter, right. So part of that is
Speaker 1: one did you know the rough and little pocket cages
Speaker 1: in there where you could there were little pockets that
Speaker 1: you can have which actually just like a pocket that
Speaker 1: you would tie around your your waist, over your usually
Speaker 1: over your your corsetree. Uh yeah, I was gonna say
Speaker 1: your chemise and then your person layer. But they also
Speaker 1: had some that were like the cage itself made a
Speaker 1: little pocket that you could like literally shove a bottle
Speaker 1: of wine. Not quite big enough for an astronach, but um,
Speaker 1: you know, sizeable. Uh. And part of that is, you know,
Speaker 1: those big extreme shapes are kind of about creating a
Speaker 1: silhouette that is fantastical and and not practical. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's part of going I am so rich. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: part of wearing the hustle through a door, y'all sure,
Speaker 1: and also being able to say, look at how much
Speaker 1: silk I can afford and how much embroidery. Wow. So
Speaker 1: do you think we're going back into an age of
Speaker 1: like large, ostentatious kind of clothing pieces. No, because I
Speaker 1: don't think it's practical in today's world, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, Like it could be more practical then because
Speaker 1: there wasn't as much hustle and bustle to life, whereas now,
Speaker 1: even if you are theoretically the idle rich, you probably
Speaker 1: still have a lot of things you have to get
Speaker 1: to and do, and you know, planes you have to
Speaker 1: fit onto, and it's not quite the same aside from
Speaker 1: like on the red carpet, especially at the at the
Speaker 1: Met Fashion show, Yeah, yeah, there are moments of that,
Speaker 1: but in terms of like general daywear or even evening
Speaker 1: where so much. But that's part of the cycle, is
Speaker 1: that things come out as tour first and then they
Speaker 1: slowly get kind of a little water down and adapted.
Speaker 1: Like many years before the blingy jeans became popular, Like
Speaker 1: if you look about five years before that, Jean Paucautier
Speaker 1: was doing, um what I will never forget. Alan Cumming
Speaker 1: covered one of his shows for some magazine and he
Speaker 1: kept calling them chandelier pants. But they were basically these
Speaker 1: genes that were just dripping with bejewel mint and beaded
Speaker 1: fringe and stuff. And then it's like, if you look
Speaker 1: just a few years later, we got to that point
Speaker 1: where we were in fact getting a lot of rhinestone, um,
Speaker 1: accessorized genes and kind of you know, more of that
Speaker 1: sparkly thing. But it starts hard in the oat coutur
Speaker 1: arena and then it kind of slowly comes down. Well,
Speaker 1: I thought we should try a little fashion experiment to
Speaker 1: see exactly how true Labour's law was to at least
Speaker 1: our experience and what we can see on the internet.
Speaker 1: So I pulled up I thought we should just look
Speaker 1: at some Google image search results for so let's start
Speaker 1: with fashion. So Labour's law says, fashion to us now
Speaker 1: should be doughty. What do we see when we look
Speaker 1: atten fashion? I don't think it's especially dowdy. I would
Speaker 1: not classify most of this is dowdy. Now, Um, where
Speaker 1: we're seeing essentially are actually analyzing at your short people
Speaker 1: are going to be who's going to be modeling? But
Speaker 1: these tall gals are looking really uh yeah yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean what's actually striking me right now is that
Speaker 1: this A lot of the photographs are things that have
Speaker 1: have have dropped into common fashion in in much the
Speaker 1: way that Holly was just discussing, what uh this nice
Speaker 1: sea through dress. No, um that um, A lot of
Speaker 1: the A line skirts and the kind of bright colors
Speaker 1: and patterns moving away from the color block that was
Speaker 1: popular in and into this sort of busy pattern that's
Speaker 1: popular today. Yeah, a lot of tribal patterns, which you
Speaker 1: know periodically those will crop up in in fashion, and
Speaker 1: but it seems like those were getting more adopted into.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can go to your local department or
Speaker 1: even like a target, and you'll see things that really
Speaker 1: echo this stuff. Okay, here's the thing I just noticed.
Speaker 1: When I type in something like two thousand five fashion,
Speaker 1: pretty much all the results are women. So does this
Speaker 1: just not even give us a window into what men's
Speaker 1: fashion looks like at any given time? And does men's
Speaker 1: fashion change less? Uh? It depends. I mean, I hate
Speaker 1: to keep invoking Gautier, but he does some amazing men's
Speaker 1: where that is very very outside of the norm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and changes a lot odd Like he's one of those
Speaker 1: designers that does a lot of dresses for men. He
Speaker 1: does a lot of like split leg clothing for men
Speaker 1: that kind of are cut like a gown would be,
Speaker 1: except their pants. Um, he's pretty egalitarian and who gets
Speaker 1: what styles in terms of his men's wear line and
Speaker 1: his women's were line. You know how gender informs fast
Speaker 1: and might be something that's worth talking about in in
Speaker 1: the future of fashion, because I can totally see societal
Speaker 1: attitudes about gender changing the way we have expectations for
Speaker 1: what men and women should wear. Um, but let's let's
Speaker 1: look at least one more. Because Labour's law says that
Speaker 1: fashion should be ridiculous, it probably will be. But I
Speaker 1: love a little ridiculous. Huh. I expected to see more plaid.
Speaker 1: I'm not seeing plaid um not not in the high
Speaker 1: fashion range. No, but oh man, here's here's in fact
Speaker 1: some of that. There's a poster for Empire Records. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh and clueless. Yeah, what did nine fashion look like?
Speaker 1: Explain this to me? I don't know what I'm seeing. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I kind of look at the mid nineties
Speaker 1: in terms of fashion as a big old miss like
Speaker 1: I always have, because we were coming off the popularity
Speaker 1: of grunge and that whole so r where people were like,
Speaker 1: no dress up, forget that, dressed down, get really sloppy
Speaker 1: and sloppy is where it's at, and super relaxed shows
Speaker 1: how you know cool I am. But there were still
Speaker 1: people going to know, let's make a pretty frock. Come on,
Speaker 1: let's get it. Yeah. And there's also that influence of
Speaker 1: the very where your wealth hip hop culture, segment of
Speaker 1: hip hop culture that was becoming very prevalent and even
Speaker 1: crossing over into some of the grunge. Where the way
Speaker 1: that we're seeing in some of these images of the
Speaker 1: crop tops and the miniskirts um that we're also influenced
Speaker 1: by the mod movement of the nineteen sixties. There's a
Speaker 1: really groovy dress in these results with some beautiful optical
Speaker 1: illusion on it that I'm we need those. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: look at one more before we move on to the future.
Speaker 1: The past of nineteen fifteen fashion. Now, according to Labor's law,
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen fashion should be romantic. And what I assume
Speaker 1: Labor means by that is not like you know, oh,
Speaker 1: we're going out on a date romance tick, but as
Speaker 1: in like it's a romantic notion having like high emotions,
Speaker 1: and right we romanticize its place in the cultural landscape. Yes, sure, um,
Speaker 1: I and I don't know I would go out on
Speaker 1: a date with some of these hats for sure. Well,
Speaker 1: you've also stumbled into, um, the period of one of
Speaker 1: my favorite designers of all time Paul Poire who just
Speaker 1: did mild and beautiful things. Uh. He was the one
Speaker 1: who designed if you guys watched down to Nabbey, those
Speaker 1: beautiful Harem pants that the youngest daughter got in a
Speaker 1: little bit of scandal ye for wearing correct Yes, he
Speaker 1: uh is a fascinating gent we um. We did a
Speaker 1: podcast on him on mist in History at one point,
Speaker 1: and one of the cool things that he did was
Speaker 1: he was sort of one of the first designers who
Speaker 1: understood branding, Like he also put out like in addition
Speaker 1: to clothing lines, like he had a little school that
Speaker 1: produced its own art pieces, in its own stationary pieces,
Speaker 1: and they were all branded Pire and he just had
Speaker 1: a He would also have parties where if the ladies
Speaker 1: weren't dressed properly, he would dress them before they could
Speaker 1: come in. That sounds both awful and amazing, Like I
Speaker 1: would have gone into all of those parties. Yeah. Uh
Speaker 1: So what was what was going on in nineteen fifteen?
Speaker 1: A lot of these clothes are are historically interesting because
Speaker 1: during that period we were in the middle of World
Speaker 1: War One, so a lot of fabrics and styles were
Speaker 1: becoming more streamlined and simple. I think is people kind
Speaker 1: of tightened their belts literally and figuratively. And also we
Speaker 1: were in the middle of the women's suffragette movement and uh,
Speaker 1: moving away from the giant corsets and giant bustles and
Speaker 1: restrictive skirts and all of that thing into something a
Speaker 1: little bit more movable and breathable. Yes, giggles, No, that
Speaker 1: sounds very insightful. I had. I'm just all I'm seeing
Speaker 1: is ankle length everything. All dresses our ankle length, and
Speaker 1: all the men are wearing ankle coats. Well, we hadn't
Speaker 1: quite escaped. Dresses didn't lift so much yet. Given another
Speaker 1: five years and they'll start popping up. Yeah, those helms
Speaker 1: will start shortening. All I can think of, though, is
Speaker 1: Mary Poppins, but that's just me. Yes, since they have
Speaker 1: the whole Suffragette movement song, it's very exciting, yeah, and
Speaker 1: lots of very gorgeous gowns. And I romanticized the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And this is also, you know, around the Titanic time,
Speaker 1: so think about those for a visual for any listeners.
Speaker 1: So I guess, I guess we do romanticize the Edwardian
Speaker 1: period because because this is this is still Edwardian light,
Speaker 1: Edwardian sure. All right, Well, let's take what we've learned
Speaker 1: and see if we can make any predictions about the
Speaker 1: future of fashion. One of the things that's sticking with
Speaker 1: me that came up a minute ago was the role
Speaker 1: of gender in what's fashionable for people to wear. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's been a few news items lately about upcoming
Speaker 1: clothing lines or pop up stores that incorporate a more
Speaker 1: unisex look. Yeah. In January of this year, self Ridges
Speaker 1: in London actually did a pop up unisex store where
Speaker 1: they offered everything from bathing suits to like, you think,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to sort of unisex things like tops,
Speaker 1: like a T shirt is you know, kind of carries
Speaker 1: across everyone, even though there are different cuts. Those are
Speaker 1: easy to kind of consider, uh, gender neutral. But they
Speaker 1: really have kind of been like, no, let's all wear
Speaker 1: the same swimsuit bottoms, let's all wear the same you know,
Speaker 1: kind of more body conscious styles. It's kind of fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and you can you can see that on on
Speaker 1: the street and the type of pants, for example, that
Speaker 1: men and women are wearing these days that are you know,
Speaker 1: for for a certain body type. Everyone is just wearing
Speaker 1: skinny leg uh type jeans well, and they're even I
Speaker 1: mean a bunch of different clothing stores and clothing lines
Speaker 1: that offer what's called the boyfriend gene basically boycott jeans
Speaker 1: that are slightly altered for a woman's figure. Yeah, for
Speaker 1: hips essentially. Yeah. I love watching the look on Joe's
Speaker 1: face as we discuss fashion, because eyes just get big
Speaker 1: at moments there. Um. Uh. American apparel Um has announced
Speaker 1: that in the fall they're going to be introducing a
Speaker 1: few gender neutral pieces in they're in their very widespread stores. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know historically that the trend of unisex clothing
Speaker 1: is is nothing new. Uh No, I mean it's happened periodically.
Speaker 1: Children will go back in history for a minute briefly,
Speaker 1: but you know, all children used to dress very similarly
Speaker 1: and very freely. Like I have a picture of my
Speaker 1: grandfather when he was a tiny child, looking for all
Speaker 1: the world like the most dolly dressed, petite little girl
Speaker 1: with the ringlets and everything. Our standards. Yeah, it used
Speaker 1: to be very standard. Little boys would have on even
Speaker 1: dresses and these very freely little enssembs up to a
Speaker 1: certain age back then, did boys have to wear that
Speaker 1: until they killed a bear? You know, it was when
Speaker 1: they were quite little, you know, then he sort of
Speaker 1: started to see the little boys suits after a certain age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it like toddler age again, the practicality of like,
Speaker 1: if it's a baby, then it doesn't really matter to
Speaker 1: the baby. And also it's just easier if it's in
Speaker 1: a gown then well and too within you know, larger families,
Speaker 1: you just hand those off. You don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about Oh no, we had a boy for or we
Speaker 1: had a girl first, and now we have a put
Speaker 1: the dress on him. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, one
Speaker 1: of the things I've always heard is that this whole
Speaker 1: idea of like blue being a color for boys and
Speaker 1: pink being a color for girls is a recent invention.
Speaker 1: It was reversed, I believe in that we early part
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century or twentieth century rather uh. And
Speaker 1: and of course, over over time, what's considered masculine and
Speaker 1: feminine for for adults has varied so greatly across cultures
Speaker 1: and epox and all of that kind of thing. Um Pants,
Speaker 1: for example, in the West, pant type clothing became a
Speaker 1: gender thing partially due to the rise of horseback infantry,
Speaker 1: and uh, it wasn't until the irrational dress movement of
Speaker 1: the mid nineteenth century that was an actual thing that happened.
Speaker 1: They were like pamphlets out like, you know, it's time
Speaker 1: for women to wear seven pounds of underclothing or less.
Speaker 1: No more of this more than ten pounds of underclothing.
Speaker 1: Um uh. That that trousers started to enter the scene
Speaker 1: for women and they were considered so shocking at the time.
Speaker 1: Pants for women were high fashion around like nineteen eleven
Speaker 1: and trendy amongst the populace by the nineteen thirties or so.
Speaker 1: And again, thank you, Paul, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But part
Speaker 1: of it also just seems to me to be changing
Speaker 1: attitudes about expecting people to dress or behave certain ways
Speaker 1: based on gender. Like I think it used to be
Speaker 1: much more common to say, well, men should dress a
Speaker 1: certain way and women should dress a certain way. And
Speaker 1: I think generally are our values are changing, um, towards
Speaker 1: just not expecting people to do one or the other
Speaker 1: so much, I I hope. So that's lovely. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: there have been you know, sort of bursts of these
Speaker 1: moments in the past. I mean, when you look at
Speaker 1: sort of David Bowie in the Laddin Sane phase. He
Speaker 1: brought in like a real trend of androgeny that was
Speaker 1: pretty popular and fairly widespread because he was, you know,
Speaker 1: a pop icon. Yeah, but again it wasn't sort of
Speaker 1: enough of a ground swell to be like this is
Speaker 1: how we do it now. But it was sort of
Speaker 1: one of those early sputters that I think leads to
Speaker 1: moments like this where it's getting totally cool for things
Speaker 1: to be less gendered in terms of how they're made
Speaker 1: and cut and designed. Oh yeah, yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: an indicative of a like larger cultural shift of us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like like redefining what gender roles and gender standards are,
Speaker 1: or even the concept of gender itself. Um or or
Speaker 1: you know, at the very least, we currently have a
Speaker 1: fascination with all of that, which you can see if
Speaker 1: you are, for example, on the internet ever by you know,
Speaker 1: by just looking at the you know, huge fuss of
Speaker 1: m ras decrying Fury Road because it had eighties in it,
Speaker 1: I guess, um or you know, when when Facebook exploded
Speaker 1: just this past week, when we're recording this podcast with
Speaker 1: a Caitlyn Jenner's photo shoot, or just the sheer fact
Speaker 1: that teenagers on Tumblr frequently have in their public profiles
Speaker 1: not only their uh sexuality and their gender, but also
Speaker 1: their sex. They'll say, Oh, I'm assist Jen dude, or
Speaker 1: I'm a trance lady or whatever it is that they're saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that dialogue is huge in the public sphere
Speaker 1: right now, which is why fashion follows suit. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think this is hopefully just indicative of we're heading towards
Speaker 1: the world where people are just more cool with whatever
Speaker 1: anybody else wants to do. You can wear what they want.
Speaker 1: It's nice. Yeah, I think it's a pretty pretty easily
Speaker 1: applicable principle. To quote RuPaul, You're all born naked. The
Speaker 1: rest is drag. Every beat everybody is in some form
Speaker 1: of drag because it's all about presentation. Yeah. Really, that's
Speaker 1: probably aren't worshiping at the altar of Mamoru the way
Speaker 1: that I do, But like, really, I hear it every morning.
Speaker 1: But that is interesting because you point out the whole
Speaker 1: thing about clothing being performative, Like when you put on
Speaker 1: an outfit, you are, in a way, in acting and performance,
Speaker 1: you're trying to like present a certain face to the world,
Speaker 1: and that ties into something that comes up when we
Speaker 1: think about a lot of these sci fi outfits that
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, which are these kind of
Speaker 1: like strange, really eye catching or sort of high engagement elements,
Speaker 1: things that are not just like a plain piece of cloth,
Speaker 1: but they do something really active and strange or weird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I love this stuff. Um. There have been
Speaker 1: a lot of these and a lot of different designers
Speaker 1: popping up kind of around these ideas that clothing should
Speaker 1: illicit responses and it should be responsive to the environment.
Speaker 1: There's a design company called Rainbow Winters and they do
Speaker 1: it's almost performance art like. They have a dress that, um,
Speaker 1: when it hears loud noises that could sound like peals
Speaker 1: of thunder, these lightning flashes will appear across the dress
Speaker 1: and it's super beautiful. Um. Diana Ang who is a
Speaker 1: designer that some people may know if they watch Project Runway.
Speaker 1: She was the one that was a huge science geek
Speaker 1: that was on there. She has a clothing company and
Speaker 1: she designs clothes that do similar things. They react to
Speaker 1: the environment and to exposure to light and uh. There's
Speaker 1: also a designer named Yengao who really is often characterized
Speaker 1: more as a performance artist, but she makes these incredible
Speaker 1: clothes that have like these tiny little servos and stuff
Speaker 1: in them, and she has some that will react to
Speaker 1: being looked at, like the track eye movement and it
Speaker 1: they'll subtly shift and it's very trippy looking when you
Speaker 1: look at some of them. Some of them just react
Speaker 1: to light, like if they're in a dark place and
Speaker 1: someone were to shine a flashlight on them, the fabrics
Speaker 1: will start to move and kind of flutter up together,
Speaker 1: and it's really beautiful and it is very trippy, Like
Speaker 1: there's this moment where you're like, am I watching something
Speaker 1: happening happened? Or am I having a cerebral event. But
Speaker 1: it's all sort of designed to just kind of draw
Speaker 1: the viewer in and think about like what clothing is
Speaker 1: and what the presentation really is. I love it. That's
Speaker 1: really interesting, But I want to revisit that in a
Speaker 1: question later in this episode about what people really want
Speaker 1: out of their clothing. Okay, sort of along those lines,
Speaker 1: I saw back in a Brazilian computer scientists to named
Speaker 1: Katia Vega, who was demonstrating the system of um false
Speaker 1: eyelashes that let you control technology. She had metallicized eyelashes
Speaker 1: and this conducive eyeshadow that when you blink or wink
Speaker 1: for more than half a second, it would complete this
Speaker 1: really low voltage circuit and let you control like a
Speaker 1: drone or or light and unlight crown of LEDs that
Speaker 1: you're wearing, because wear led crowns sometimes, And uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's more along the lines of performance are at
Speaker 1: that point. But it's really interesting to me that that
Speaker 1: designers are thinking about how to incorporate practicality into these
Speaker 1: fashion statements that we're making. I just think about how
Speaker 1: many times things would be blinking, because I'm blinker anyway. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's she said that it was a hard blink
Speaker 1: that it was. You know that it's the more than
Speaker 1: half a second is to make sure that your eyelashes
Speaker 1: fluttering isn't going to set off yourself bring all of
Speaker 1: the power on the block going out. But see, then
Speaker 1: you don't know if the person across the room is
Speaker 1: winking at you or just trying to activate their drone
Speaker 1: to something out of your dress. Well yeah, I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess if their drone comes over to you, then
Speaker 1: you know, and if it doesn't, then it doesn't quite work.
Speaker 1: But of course, speaking of clothing and fashion items that
Speaker 1: activate electronics. That of course brings us to nanogenerators, which
Speaker 1: we talked about before, but are worth mentioning again. The
Speaker 1: incorporation into clothing of ways of generating power. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: actually a lot of work on this going on very
Speaker 1: near to us at Georgia Tech. Um dr z l
Speaker 1: Wang that oh yeah, has a lab there has really
Speaker 1: advanced nanogenerators quite a bit. Uh, And they're not just
Speaker 1: for textiles. You can also incorporate them, like there are
Speaker 1: some that are intended as medical devices that will be
Speaker 1: self powering, where the movement of your body, for example,
Speaker 1: like your lungs breathing will flex the nanogenerator enough to
Speaker 1: generate a current. Actually like run a pacemaker. Yeah, your
Speaker 1: your heart beating will run here. But of course it
Speaker 1: also gets incorporated. Um. They did not seem to come
Speaker 1: to Fruition, and I don't remember the company, but for
Speaker 1: a while you were seeing like in those little mini
Speaker 1: look for this in the future kind of blurbs in
Speaker 1: in fitness magazines like oh, there's a company working on
Speaker 1: putting nano generators into like running pants, and eventually they
Speaker 1: will power your iPod or your you know, shuffle and
Speaker 1: then you will have to keep running to keep getting music.
Speaker 1: And it's a great concept, but it doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: have taken off because it's been a couple of years
Speaker 1: since those were really kind of popping up everywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember hearing about this too. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: generally the idea was that you would have piezo electric
Speaker 1: elements that like when you when you smash them or
Speaker 1: press them, apply pressure, it sends a current to something,
Speaker 1: but you couldn't ever get that much current out of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a human body produces. Yeah. Yeah, it was a break
Speaker 1: in the level of current that you could get out
Speaker 1: of the things without storing like a heavy battery upon
Speaker 1: your person. Yeah, like a few years ago. I'm sure
Speaker 1: it's advanced since then, but that was when I was
Speaker 1: working on a project for work here for it, and
Speaker 1: it was like you could get about to a batteries
Speaker 1: worth of power from you know, a pretty decent amount
Speaker 1: of Now, my theory is just slap those on a
Speaker 1: bunch of kindergarteners and let them go and that's a
Speaker 1: lot of a batteries we can power the world. But
Speaker 1: you know, coaches, um, Yeah, it seems like nanogenerators have
Speaker 1: kind of been supplanted in terms of what's the next
Speaker 1: big thing in technology clothing with solar systems. There's a
Speaker 1: company called Wearable Solar that makes clothes that have solar
Speaker 1: panels on them. That looks cool, you know. I have
Speaker 1: to say that's really the sticking point that the actual
Speaker 1: designs are a little They're doing some pretty interesting things,
Speaker 1: and they're really working to finesse them and they're improving
Speaker 1: all the time, but they still look a little like
Speaker 1: something out of th h X one eight, you know,
Speaker 1: they're a little clunky monkey um. And there's another company
Speaker 1: which is called um Voltaic Systems, and they actually make
Speaker 1: bags that will similarly collect solar energy and create power
Speaker 1: with it. Right now, the bags are all very utility.
Speaker 1: They're not super fashion e but give it a minute.
Speaker 1: It's an easy to adapt situation. I remember some backpacks
Speaker 1: coming out maybe five years ago or so that I
Speaker 1: saw that we're right, had little solar panels built in.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting. But also there is the question of
Speaker 1: the materials that we make our clothing out of, and
Speaker 1: how our clothes are manufactured, and how this does actually
Speaker 1: become a part of the fashion because the material in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways is the fashion element, right, I
Speaker 1: mean material matters. Yeah, yeah, it's material and construction, and
Speaker 1: construction follows the materials. So I saw something that I
Speaker 1: thought was really interesting. It was actually a feature in
Speaker 1: a new item that was being inducted into the Museum
Speaker 1: of Modern Art, which was a quote four D dress. Oh,
Speaker 1: which is not not a size I had to realize,
Speaker 1: but that refers to four D printing. So that's a
Speaker 1: concept we've talked about on this show before. But the
Speaker 1: idea is three D printed materials that change over time, right,
Speaker 1: due to some kind of stimulus. Right. So the traditional
Speaker 1: one is, say you print out a flat sheet that's
Speaker 1: sort of like a cross shape, and then you put
Speaker 1: it in water, or you shake it, or you do
Speaker 1: something that applies some kind of like changing force on it,
Speaker 1: and along some preprinted hinges, it will fold up into
Speaker 1: a cube standard, right, a cube. Yeah. I wish I
Speaker 1: had more cubes in my house because I'm always trying
Speaker 1: to solve the lament configuration and if I could just
Speaker 1: put some decoy cubes that would keep me away from
Speaker 1: the real danger. But anyway, these there were some people
Speaker 1: from a design studio called nervous system, and they designed
Speaker 1: a kinematic dress created using this four D printing principle.
Speaker 1: So it's three D printing materials that adapt over time
Speaker 1: to make a dress. Well what would that mean? So
Speaker 1: normally you would have to make clothes by stitching together
Speaker 1: flat pieces of fabric or material, but this was one
Speaker 1: piece printed in a three D printer. So it's printed
Speaker 1: in sort of this jumbled up ball. And it's a
Speaker 1: custom body fitted three D dress that's made from a
Speaker 1: digital three D scan of the body of the person
Speaker 1: who's going to be wearing it. And it's a dress
Speaker 1: made out of two thousand, two hundred and seventy nine
Speaker 1: quote unique triangular panels. I love that it's a great
Speaker 1: triangular panels. So each of these little panels is going
Speaker 1: to be rigid, but they make the dress, uh fabric y,
Speaker 1: I guess they make it flexible when they connect at
Speaker 1: these hinges. And so you can watch a video of
Speaker 1: this online if you want to look it up. Tons
Speaker 1: of hinges, little triangles. It makes something that just looks
Speaker 1: like a dress and looks yeah, and I think that's
Speaker 1: really interesting. The idea that you could print your clothes
Speaker 1: in the future. Like you could go straight from a
Speaker 1: digital design to a print to something that you could wear.
Speaker 1: So sort of imagine a future where instead of trying
Speaker 1: on clothes at the store, you scan your body. I
Speaker 1: guess you'd have to get naked at the store to
Speaker 1: scan it. Maybe you got one of these at home.
Speaker 1: I don't know. You scan your body and then the
Speaker 1: computer comes up with the piece of clothing that is
Speaker 1: a perfect fit for you. You can make alterations to
Speaker 1: it in your little Photoshop style clothing editor, and then
Speaker 1: you print it, and then you can wear it, and
Speaker 1: then everything will have grito on it. Right now, I
Speaker 1: have to do it the chump way where I have
Speaker 1: to actually design fabric and order it to be printed
Speaker 1: and then make a thing out of it. This will
Speaker 1: really save me steps. Yeah yeah, thank you, future, I hope.
Speaker 1: So now, of course this is right now. This is
Speaker 1: a kind of like intensive and expensive process. That that's
Speaker 1: why you see it's coming out of like a design
Speaker 1: studio and not like a store that's just making tons
Speaker 1: of these two sell people. But I can imagine like
Speaker 1: the price and in the intensivity of the design stage
Speaker 1: coming down. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sure intensivity will pretend
Speaker 1: it's a word, whether or not you coined it. Chimp uh.
Speaker 1: We are the music makers and we are the dreamers
Speaker 1: of the dreams. Um. Other other fabrics that might be
Speaker 1: made in the future include organic ones and not like cotton. No,
Speaker 1: there is actually a company called Bioculture, and they have
Speaker 1: figured out this way to grow fabric from basically like
Speaker 1: a sugar green tea water solution with a mother culture
Speaker 1: of bacteria. This basically grows a piece of fabric, not
Speaker 1: like like a laser cut and turned into clothes, not
Speaker 1: a thread that has to be woven. Correct. It's pretty
Speaker 1: fascinating and right now it's in early stages. One of
Speaker 1: the things, um there is a great documentary. I was
Speaker 1: actually watching it right before we came in here, so
Speaker 1: I didn't even add it to the notes. It's called
Speaker 1: The Next Black and they talk with a lot of
Speaker 1: different people that are, you know, sort of shaping the
Speaker 1: future of fashion. But this woman behind Biocutur was saying, like,
Speaker 1: right now, it's still in its infancy and it's very simple,
Speaker 1: but what she envisions for the future is that eventually
Speaker 1: they could genetically engineer the bacteria to be able to
Speaker 1: produce different kinds of fabric and different thicknesses, isn't different
Speaker 1: with different qualities, and then it will just become a
Speaker 1: huge thing. And the really great thing is that there's
Speaker 1: almost no waste to things like this because you can
Speaker 1: just reintegrate whatever your your cutout pieces are. You can
Speaker 1: either biodegrade them or you can potentially reintegrate them as
Speaker 1: perhaps a mother culture depending on its status at that point. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. You no more like like beautiful scraps of
Speaker 1: fabric that you have no use for. You can almost
Speaker 1: find a use. Yeah. Well, if it's bigger than a
Speaker 1: four by four inch piece, you can find a use
Speaker 1: for it. There are always handbags to be made. It's true,
Speaker 1: it's true. Um uh, well, I wanted to talk for
Speaker 1: a minute about um the fashion of hiding, but using
Speaker 1: fashion for digital camouflage. So you're talking about fashion. This
Speaker 1: just designed to blend in with the crowd, so that
Speaker 1: you're the opposite of a character in the fifth element,
Speaker 1: just kind of and you're more like a character in
Speaker 1: a William Gibson novel. There you go. Um no, but
Speaker 1: but that is certainly a thing that I could see
Speaker 1: people doing, and that people frequently do, like the fashion
Speaker 1: of just blending in and being ignored. Um, it's what
Speaker 1: I go for. My main fashion thing is like, is
Speaker 1: this not going to be noticeably ugly? I don't always succeed.
Speaker 1: Um no No. When that that facial recognition boom hit
Speaker 1: um in coinciding with the leak of the n S
Speaker 1: a s sort of best practices that everyone started freaking
Speaker 1: out about with completely good reason. Um. A few concepts
Speaker 1: surrounding this, this fashion of digital camouflage surfaced and that's
Speaker 1: uh fashion that will let you hide from facial recognition technology. Um.
Speaker 1: For example, there's one project called c V Dazzle that
Speaker 1: released a kind of look book of tips for fashionable
Speaker 1: techno camouflage. They were inspired by the the cubism designs
Speaker 1: of World War One naval camouflage, which are fascinating unto themselves.
Speaker 1: And and also the understanding that the facial recognition software
Speaker 1: depends on I ding key facial features and UM symmetry
Speaker 1: and comparative tones across the contours of any given face.
Speaker 1: That means the kind of highlighting and shadows that are
Speaker 1: created by the bridge of the nose and cheekbones and
Speaker 1: the brow across most humans. Yeah. Um so Their idea
Speaker 1: is to arrange your hair in ways that obscure part
Speaker 1: of your face and to use makeup to disrupt those
Speaker 1: lines of your contours, your cheekbones, your nose, bridge, your brow,
Speaker 1: and you know, you kind of get bonus points for
Speaker 1: creating designs that mimic eyes elsewhere on your face that
Speaker 1: will totally freak out the software and the designs really
Speaker 1: wound up looking like a street punk version of Gem
Speaker 1: and the Holograms. It was not what i'd call practical
Speaker 1: for daywhere necessarily it was something like at a transmit
Speaker 1: if you guys have read the comic book trans Metropolitan.
Speaker 1: But I mean it was interesting, like the restaurant. There's
Speaker 1: a brestaurant and Athens called Transmitted after the book. Okay,
Speaker 1: to the best of my knowledge, it is. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if I would want to eat a cool Can
Speaker 1: you just go furiosa and just engine grease the top
Speaker 1: half of your face? I think we all should be
Speaker 1: more like furious. I mean, I love her, but that
Speaker 1: looks not for me. She pulls it off. I'll do
Speaker 1: something else, but not so much with that one, not
Speaker 1: not the and not the engine grease. Maybe yeah, bad
Speaker 1: for the skin. So well, that's interesting. It makes me wonder, though,
Speaker 1: is trying to hide from camera as a fashion statement.
Speaker 1: I guess it kind of is. Well, I think if
Speaker 1: you do something like this, you make it one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's not It's not just the practical aspect of like,
Speaker 1: I don't want facial recognition software to keey me in
Speaker 1: and put me in a day base somewhere. It's that
Speaker 1: you're actually saying, like, I'm not the kind of person
Speaker 1: who wants to be recognized. This is who I am.
Speaker 1: Fashion statement. This is a visual representation of myself and
Speaker 1: that is slightly paranoid with good reason. Yeah. But with
Speaker 1: glittery shadow and makeup. Yeah yeah, I think beautiful bright
Speaker 1: colors and very strange fringe styles. The magical combination of
Speaker 1: peacock in and hiding at the same time, right right,
Speaker 1: which is what I found so great about it. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: high fashion hiding. Um all right, yeah, another thing along
Speaker 1: those lines. Um. Japan's National Institute of Informatics released this
Speaker 1: pair of goggles that will hypothetically block your face on
Speaker 1: infrared sensitive cameras due to them having these very bright,
Speaker 1: outward shining l e ed s that we're in the
Speaker 1: near infrared range, so you're not gonna give your coworkers
Speaker 1: headaches wearing them, but cameras will be blinded by them
Speaker 1: as long as they pick up the infrared. Yeah. I've
Speaker 1: not seen anyone wearing them. I don't think. I don't
Speaker 1: think they really caught on, mostly because a lot of
Speaker 1: cameras are visual range and not infrared range. But you know,
Speaker 1: for certain uses I could see how how they could be,
Speaker 1: you know, terrific. Um another thing that I guess we
Speaker 1: might be moving towards, but that I have not seen
Speaker 1: catch on with anyone yet. Um, what if what if
Speaker 1: fashion becomes deemed unnecessary? What if clothes don't need to
Speaker 1: exist anymore in the future. Oh so you're going like
Speaker 1: full on beyond just the jumpsuits future into like why
Speaker 1: we're clothing at all? Yeah, Well, that is actually an
Speaker 1: interesting idea, I think, because if you think about the
Speaker 1: history of clothes, in addition to being purely decorative and
Speaker 1: and sort of fashionable or expressive of your personality, clothing
Speaker 1: has had, you know, at least a largely functional origin,
Speaker 1: Like it protects you from cold trapping, body heat, protects
Speaker 1: you from the elements, so rain and snow and sleep
Speaker 1: and all that protects you from insects and mosquito bites,
Speaker 1: protects your skin from the sun. In some cases, it
Speaker 1: will actually protect you from mechanical damage. So you can
Speaker 1: see like a lot of like a leather armor basically. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then of course there's the protection of our sensibilities,
Speaker 1: the idea that we think like nudity is socially inappropriate.
Speaker 1: But I was just thinking about how a lot of
Speaker 1: people these days live in climate controlled, sheltered, mostly bug
Speaker 1: free environments and spend like of their time there. So
Speaker 1: if you are a person who lives a life like that,
Speaker 1: where almost all of your existence is in a place
Speaker 1: where you don't need to be protected from cold, rain, sleet, sun, insects,
Speaker 1: snake bites, saddle sores, stuff like that, will we eventually
Speaker 1: select for nudity, Like, is there any reason people will
Speaker 1: continue to want to wear clothes? Well, one question, will
Speaker 1: we continue to keep pets? M hm? You know, just
Speaker 1: a piece of fabric will help a lot from a
Speaker 1: cat walking on you and accidentally giving you a claw mark.
Speaker 1: But if we become the equivalent of an indoor cat,
Speaker 1: But if we're still also keeping indoor cat, But I
Speaker 1: want to say no, just because I like clothes so much,
Speaker 1: Like at this point, are we living on the axiom?
Speaker 1: Like I don't. I don't know where we land at
Speaker 1: that point. Well, I had a kind of stupid idea.
Speaker 1: But my my thought was, you know, this would make
Speaker 1: chairs difficult because like I wouldn't I wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: you know, if I lived in a world where everybody
Speaker 1: was naked all the time, I wouldn't want to like
Speaker 1: have public use chairs where I put my butt, my
Speaker 1: naked butt on some chair somebody else's. But I mean,
Speaker 1: I barely want to sit on the subway train to
Speaker 1: begin with, like with multiple layers between my butt and
Speaker 1: the previous persons. But so yeah, I think, but maybe
Speaker 1: maybe in the future there will be nudity, but all
Speaker 1: chairs will have like the chair equivalent of the toilet's
Speaker 1: eat cover at the airport. Well, or they'll all be
Speaker 1: made with antimicrobial materials, so would be self self cleaning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but no, no, Well, and I think the sensibilities will
Speaker 1: override a lot of it anyway, And too, if you
Speaker 1: take away the clothes, there's a whole cultural thing then
Speaker 1: of like people will have to actually be humans and
Speaker 1: have conversations and cultivate personalities. Oh. Man, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: a I'm a close person. I love it. But I
Speaker 1: think if you take all the clothes away, it will
Speaker 1: be become very, very difficult to talk to one another. Yeah. Also, man,
Speaker 1: like that would erase so many like like class lines
Speaker 1: and gender lines. I mean that would and a lot
Speaker 1: of people are not going to want to let those
Speaker 1: go for Oh, certainly not No, huh, good question though.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm I can't imagine being comfortable. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are new diest colonies and have been for a
Speaker 1: long time. Yeah, but not for everyone. Yeah, those are
Speaker 1: definitely the a niche and not the the pervasive cultural norm. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: here's another sort of question for discussion then, and it's
Speaker 1: about the idea of these sort of like what we
Speaker 1: were talking about with these high engagement pieces of clothing
Speaker 1: and and sort of e clothes. So we we've talked
Speaker 1: about wearables e clothing, and I think it's a very
Speaker 1: simple proposition these days to create textiles or clothing items
Speaker 1: that have some form of embedded electronics or or some
Speaker 1: kind of reactive visible feature. But most of our discussion
Speaker 1: in the past has sort of been about functionality, like
Speaker 1: you know, clothes that are self cleaning or gathering data
Speaker 1: or displaying data for you, or you know it might
Speaker 1: be fitness data or health data. But what what about
Speaker 1: simple fashion, Like do you think in the future many
Speaker 1: people will actually want to wear clothing with embedded electronic
Speaker 1: elements like these clothes we see with LED lights and
Speaker 1: screens and displays embedded in them just for aesthetic reasons
Speaker 1: or is that going to remain the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that it is today where it's just kind of like
Speaker 1: a weird novel to your curiosity. I mean, would people
Speaker 1: actually want screens and lights and stuff in the clothes
Speaker 1: they wear every day? Um? Yeah? If I wouldn't get
Speaker 1: the number of weird looks that I know that I would,
Speaker 1: I would be wearing a two two like studded with
Speaker 1: LED lights right now. I don't care about weird looks.
Speaker 1: But they're hard to wash. That's a trick. They're hard
Speaker 1: to construct and they're hard to wash. Not that hard
Speaker 1: to construct, Like there are a lot of groups now
Speaker 1: that you know online groups that will do like LED
Speaker 1: clothing that we're incorporating, But it's the washability that makes
Speaker 1: it tricky. Yeah, I mean, I feel like if you
Speaker 1: go to a tech convention today, you're going to see
Speaker 1: tons of this stuff. Are you kidding? If you go
Speaker 1: to a nighttime race, yeah, there are a million people
Speaker 1: wearing two tuos with lights in them. Yeah okay, but
Speaker 1: you're saying, like just the practical factor of the washability,
Speaker 1: well okay, let's eliminate that. Let's say it's just as
Speaker 1: washable as your standard piece of clothing. Wearing it right now?
Speaker 1: You think people really do want that for standard clothing. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's a concept of flashiness. Literally, I
Speaker 1: suppose that. Um, it sounds like for you it would
Speaker 1: be a foreign concept, like you're trying not to attract
Speaker 1: attention with your clothing. Yeah, it seemed ridiculous to me.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I mean, I can't imagine you
Speaker 1: wanting to have elements on my clothing that would like
Speaker 1: make people look at me. I don't care if people
Speaker 1: look at me or not. I just care if I'm delighted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and here's the magic words. And this is why Diana
Speaker 1: Ain't always stays a designer that I love. She knows
Speaker 1: the magic word to get me to go. I want
Speaker 1: that and it's Twinkle. She'll be like, this is the
Speaker 1: Twinkle Collection. I'm like, shut up and take my money.
Speaker 1: I wish to have Twinkle clothes. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: It's it's you're walking glitter at that point. Who doesn't
Speaker 1: want that? Yeah, yeah, it's it's not everybody is Tinkerbell.
Speaker 1: Well I'm not tink about either, but I almost there's
Speaker 1: I'm holding back from going down a Disney Fairies tangent
Speaker 1: road with just a galloping vengeance. I appreciate it. I
Speaker 1: think we all do. Thank you, Hollywood. We know, we
Speaker 1: know you're you're you're one of the other fairies. We
Speaker 1: get it, Holly, Holly. I think we should plumb your
Speaker 1: expertise on a on another question, a question that actually
Speaker 1: came from a user. Oh yeah yeah. A listener in fact,
Speaker 1: at Rosie Philip via Twitter asked, will Cravats ever make
Speaker 1: a comeback? Uh, Lauren, I know you've done some research
Speaker 1: on this. Uh yeah, okay, So so I you know,
Speaker 1: I looked into it and the next tie really is
Speaker 1: a descendant of the Cravats. So so it's basically never
Speaker 1: gone out really, but um, the Cravat was supposedly originated
Speaker 1: by Croatian malicious or the sixteen hundreds, then popularized by
Speaker 1: French fashion. They're called cravats because the sword for the
Speaker 1: Croatian militia was basically cravat or cravat rather um. But
Speaker 1: it then bled over into British fashion and thus, to
Speaker 1: use the parlance of our times, went viral. Um, can
Speaker 1: I stop you and ask you a question? Of course,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, so a next, I know what a neck
Speaker 1: tie is. A cravat is basically just like a more
Speaker 1: loosely tied, less shaped kind of necktie thing. You're onto
Speaker 1: it with the less structure, but it doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: it's loosely tied, like if you look at like French cravats,
Speaker 1: sometimes they would be wrapped multiple times and tied fairly
Speaker 1: tightly around the neck. Sometimes they're tied a little more loosely,
Speaker 1: but they're just they're just not the structure that you
Speaker 1: would get from like a bow tire in neck time.
Speaker 1: I looked it up. But but but a cravat, yeah,
Speaker 1: is basically a scarf that is tied about the neck
Speaker 1: in whatever fashion the user intends to tie it in. Um.
Speaker 1: There is a cravat day in Croatia as of two
Speaker 1: thousand three, it's October every year. Let's celebrate it, guys.
Speaker 1: For that first one, there was an art installation of
Speaker 1: a gargantuan redneck tie nodded around a local arena, like
Speaker 1: it was tied around this colosseum. Yeah, coming out the
Speaker 1: side of Yeah, it was beautiful. Um, but so so
Speaker 1: so Holly, what's a what's your opinion on the fashion
Speaker 1: statement of cravat? They're already back, oh are they? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Last year Nicholas Parsons, who is a British personality, he's
Speaker 1: kind of a TV hosty kind of personality, has been
Speaker 1: around a very long time. But he wrote this whole
Speaker 1: thing last year about like cravat back everybody, I have said,
Speaker 1: so so start wearing um. But also I mean Fred
Speaker 1: from Scooby Doo is the famous cravat. That's true, but
Speaker 1: or some people have argued it's a neckerchief, it's a cravat.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, it is. Here's a picture of Brad
Speaker 1: Pitt wearing a cravat. Yeah, they're very zassy and I
Speaker 1: think Roth is standing right behind him. So if it
Speaker 1: makes Elie off, follow you and I you know, and
Speaker 1: I think that the popularity of British period dramas, for example,
Speaker 1: have probably influenced to that. Just just S Bendict, cumber Box, existence, um,
Speaker 1: and etcetera. I think, you know, I'm very into late
Speaker 1: clothing freedom, where whatever you want, whenever you want. I
Speaker 1: don't care if it's in fashion or not. If it's
Speaker 1: making you happy, you do it, you're living it and
Speaker 1: it's cool. Get your life to use another ruepaule thing. Um.
Speaker 1: So I think nothing ever completely goes out of fashion
Speaker 1: unless you decide that you don't want to wear it,
Speaker 1: and then it's out of your fashion. And there are
Speaker 1: certainly cultural fashion trends, but everything is on the table
Speaker 1: in my opinion at all times. I'm gonna wear a
Speaker 1: bustlegown tomorrow, yes, all right, but they're hard to drive in.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, i'd imagine. So what are the takeaways from
Speaker 1: for the future of fashion from the people who know
Speaker 1: what they're talking about here? I feel like I heard
Speaker 1: um more acceptance of basically more freedom and less expectance
Speaker 1: that you would wear a certain thing based on what
Speaker 1: your culture is or what your gender is or something
Speaker 1: like that. More freedom, more individuality, and that probably translating
Speaker 1: to more androgyny in fashion. Uh lots of these electronic
Speaker 1: elements that as long as we can get past the
Speaker 1: washing machine barrier, which somehow I feel like can be beaten,
Speaker 1: we can get there. You're saying your pro electronics. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: why not electronics and everything? Uh forty printed clothing, strange
Speaker 1: biocultured fabrics. What else? Camouflage. I I don't know if
Speaker 1: digital camouflage will ever really become an actual trend. I'm
Speaker 1: doubtful personally. I think it will become probably popular in
Speaker 1: a less peacocky way in a niche market certainly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there is a group of people out there
Speaker 1: who's like, I need that because they just don't like
Speaker 1: the idea of the you know, pervasive all seeing eye everywhere. Uh.
Speaker 1: So I think that's going to evolve. It will be
Speaker 1: less about kind of the showy gym and the holograms
Speaker 1: makeup and more. There will be other ways that people
Speaker 1: will develop again, probably more along the lines of those
Speaker 1: goggles technologies that you can use to write counteract technologies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what else? Yes to cravats, no de nudity, You were
Speaker 1: only the cravat, that's all. You're technically not nude. You're
Speaker 1: like kind of togas that are made out of just
Speaker 1: one giant cravat, perhaps for men and women. Next Okay, sorry, um, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I I hope I hope that it will be more
Speaker 1: of an anything goes kind of future in fashion and
Speaker 1: that more, more types of fabrics and more choices will
Speaker 1: become more affordable due to some of these technologies that
Speaker 1: are letting us create fabric in in these ways. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and hopefully if you were sweatshops that would
Speaker 1: be really great as well. All right, well, Holly, it
Speaker 1: has been excellent having you on the show with us today.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming in. Where can people
Speaker 1: find your work? First, thank you for having me. But
Speaker 1: if they wanna chase us over to miss in History,
Speaker 1: you can go to missed in History dot com? Uh,
Speaker 1: and you can hit us Twitter at most in History
Speaker 1: and we're on Facebook, Facebook dot com slash missed in History. Awesome, Lauren.
Speaker 1: Where can people find our work? Well, Joe, it's on
Speaker 1: the internet. Um, you can. You can check out our website.
Speaker 1: It is fw thinking dot com. If you would like
Speaker 1: to ask us a question the way that at Rosie
Speaker 1: Philip did, you can do so on Twitter at FW
Speaker 1: Thinking on Facebook and at Google Plus. FW Thinking is
Speaker 1: basically the name in all of those places. You can
Speaker 1: also send us an email and email at FW Thinking
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works dot com. We hope to hear
Speaker 1: from you, and you'll hear again from us real soon.
Speaker 1: For more on this topic in the future of technology,
Speaker 1: I'll visit Forward Thinking dot Com. Problem brought to you
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