The other day, I was reading an old Italian Vogue (namely n°571, march 1998) that stood out from the pile of magazines because of its Blade Runner-like cover and a promising title: FUTURISTIC. Nothing to do with Futurism, but much with futurism – Editorials: “Metallic”, “La Belle Androïde”, “Zabriskie Pt.”, “Synthetic Age”, “Virtual Make-up”; articles: “Al Futuro”, “Mutation”, “Future Wear”, “Far Away”, and so on. Even the ballet review in that issue was about Béjart’s Mutationx, with costumes by Versace; the art review treasured digital experiments and new techniques, the interior design stuff was for the Jetsons, piranha-flower-chairs, synthetic grass and the likes. Between the advertisements, made of late Nineties sleek and long dresses, gorgeous flat and asymmetrical Roversi-style hair and the transparent shoes en vogue at the time, everything was dedicated to the new, the virtual, the exciting, the synthetic… in a word, the future. In the late Nineties, our minds were still full of androids, replicants, space princesses of any kind.

McQueen, Spring/Summer 1998

S/S98, that season when even the Victorianist Alexander McQueen was dressing broken dolls of the 2200s, Philip Treacy was making firmament hats, and synthetic fabrics flourished everywhere on silver garments and futuristic jewels. At the end of the magazine, I found an editorial by Lele Acquarone about futurology in fashion. After the nostalgic trip through 1998′s dreams, a question crossed my mind: when did we stop being futuristic? We had Courrèges, Cardin, Paco Rabanne, Thierry Mugler, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Vivienne Westwood, Issey Miyake, Helmut Lang, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Junya Watanabe, all providing us with visions of the Future. A future that was still a utopia, much like fashion’s filmic inspirations (the list would be too long here). In 1998, 2000 was still seen as a goal, the door to both the future and the futuristic.

We all witnessed that, in fact, not much changed with the year 2000. No millenium bug, no apocalypse, no spectacular changes in the world. Paradoxically, the 00′s proved to be the decade of vintage. In the last years, “vintage” became both elitist and popular, chic and avant-garde, and assaulted every sector of our societies. The “plastic fabrics” were demonized and designers went back to über-organic and politically correct cotton&friends, the TV recreated conservative ‘vintage’ universes (see Mad Men or Pan Am lately), forgetting about, for instance, the space craze of the Sixties. Architecture and fashion have gone back to the organic, to compromises, remakes even. More and more people hate abstract art (that has, after all, a century) and take refuge in reassuring tales of conservatism. Even the new club kids, rebels par excellence, are nothing but the shadow of  the real ones (of, needless to say, DISCO 2000), they are only a bad remake in a decade of revivals, may they be of games, films or cars.

On the other hand, our technology reached a certain state of perfection, mobile phones and demonic gadgets are omnipresent and even the TV has now become… vintage. One would hope that these incredible technologic advances would make us look at the future, but it is not the case. We have Avatar, technically perfect but ideologically conservative, instead of, say, the crazy camp Barbarella or the psychedelic Planet of the Vampires. In fashion, the last afecionados of “futurism”, such as Nicholas Ghesquière for Balenciaga, still show on nineteenth-century floorboards, while others, at the eight of techno-futurism, choose to reproduce bourgeois or “vintage” prints (Mary Katrantzou)… Erdem’s women would be, at best, grand-mothers in space. Rick Owens, McQueen & co are still referring to the Gothic, while Gareth Pugh owes a massive debt to Leigh Bowery and Iris van Herpen recreates botticellian ideals.

The conclusion is that, in this first year of the 10s, we still lack utopia, perhaps grandeur of thought. At the a time when materials become reassuring instead of futuristic, the strange is banned as uncanny in general, and, more disturbingly, we lack an aesthetic of the future. Every decade had its own centric vision of the future – may it be the optimistic pastel-and-white imagination of the Sixties or the apocalyptic tones of the Eighties. What is ours? At the eve of 2012, after a decade when we started looking backwards instead of forwards, one wonders where the magic of futurism has gone. A quote from Zurlini’s La Prima Notte di Quiete (1972) was the first thing that crossed my mind while reading Acquarone’s article: “molto passato, poco presente, niente futuro”. A pessimistic statement perhaps, but it is fitting our 2000′s like no other – “a lot of past, not much present, zero future”.
Perhaps instead of being nostalgic of clothes and replicating another decade’s lifestyle and habits, we should have a vintage state of mind. Let us stop with sterile copies, let us aim at a funnier future, and, more importantly, let us invent it.

Merry Christmas!

Mario Bava, Terrore nello Spazio; Thierry Mugler.

p.s.: let us be vintage nonetheless, and look back at a very remote vision of the future (didn’t they say everything started in the Sixties??)… Designers from the 30′s anticipate the year 2000 – a lesson in how to be futuristic.

Graphic Design Isa Jakob