Thursday, April 21, 2011

Paco Rabanne

Paco finally hits the blog with some backstage action from 1969.....

Some more beautiful Courreges

1968 the height of Space fever, beautiful symetrical clean fashion.  Courreges hits it just right .....

Russian space couture

This is a report on a russian space suit 

Japanese space fashion show

News report on Japanese space fashion show

Friday, April 1, 2011

NASA Mobility tests for space suit prototypes



This video features archival NASA footage of mobility tests for several spacesuit prototypes.

Another space suits book

This is another really interesting book which looks at the technology of space suits



New book "Spacesuit: fashioning Apollo"

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134855907/How-To-Dress-For-Space-Travel
A really interesting article by Professor NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX (University of California)
where he talks about the spacesuits of the Apollo missions....


Review from Amazon:

"Woven, as befits its topic, with multiple and colored threads borrowed from an astounding variety of fields and domains--technology, politics, media, and fashion design, to name only a few--this path-breaking book provides an innovative reading of the space race. Above all, it illuminates the relevance of this race for designers from yesterday and today." --Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard Graduate School of Design "A layered tour through the interwoven histories of spaceflight and its clothing, rethinking the body's technologies in the cybernetic era. The first sartorial history of spaceflight!" --David Mindell, Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT, and author, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight "This surely is one of the most deeply researched books on design ever written. De Monchaux follows the history of--among other things--fashion, space travel, politics, and architecture to demonstrate an astonishing relationship between what the Apollo astronauts wore and the design of the built environment." --Ralph Caplan, author of By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons, and and 2010 recipient of the Smithsonian's "Design Mind" National Design Award "Nicholas de Monchaux offers in this remarkable book a far-reaching and broad-based analysis of the spacesuit, interpreting it as far more than a functional garment protecting astronauts: as an artifact at the nexus of society, science, and spacefaring. Far from the internalist histories so common for NASA, de Monchaux ranges from popular culture to technology to advertising to art, in the process illuminating the subtleties of construction and use of this individualized spacesuit." --Roger D. Launius, Senior Curator, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum "A veritable fantastic voyage! Not only along the intricate and incredible journey that it turns out links brassiere to stratosphere, but deep inside the ether wherein architecture and fashion form the nebulae of contemporary life. Combining humor and lightness with exacting attention to detail, de Monchaux's book offers a new model of scholarship that revises our view of technology as a hard instrument of science and gently reveals it to be part of the vast flux of cultural production." --Sylvia Lavin, Director of Critical Studies, Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA
To buy the book on Amazon