The Soviets may have launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, but-as far as the fashion world was concerned-the Space Age did not take off until 1964, when Andre Courreges launched models in helmet-shaped hats and metallic jumpsuits down a Paris catwalk. Astronauts wore white because it made them visible against the black expanse of space; for fashion and interior designers, however, white represented an optimistic vision of a Utopian future, as well as new textile technologies that made it possible to produce optical whites suggestive of scientists' lab coats and the moon's fluorescence. This 'space aesthetic' owed more to science fiction than science, celebrating 'space travel imagery without consideration of its practical realities' (p. 25), writes Barbara Brownie in Spacewear.
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