Who is going to do laundry in space?
Forty years ago Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind when he stepped onto the moon’s surface. In the years leading up to that July 20, 1969 event, imaginations had been running wild with what life would be like in lunar cities and how we would dress for deep space travel. Star Trek had been on the air since 1966, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, had been a film hit in 1968; both looked at variations of contemporary fashion for the future but as textile designer Julian Tompshin quipped ”Who is going to do laundry in space?”
The answer was disposables! In the fall of 1966 the paper dress had been launched as a novelty. Paper and other disposable materials, such as reemay, were soon being used to create ephemeral fashion favourites.
Surprisingly, the flickery black and white images of the lunar landing seemed anticlimactic, and interest in futurism and modernity declined almost immediately as fashions turned towards the ’back to nature’ hippie movement that would become more of a headline the following month at an outdoor concert called Woodstock.
However, for the three years before the lunar landing, everything was about the world of tomorrow and outer space. All these examples of paper and disposable dresses date between September 1966 and July 1969. If you want to know more about the paper dresses fad you can order a copy of Ready to Tear: Paper Fashion of the 60s, or contact us through our website.
View of our Ready to Tear travelling exhibiiton of 1960s paper dresses