The Future Was Made of Plastic
The future is surprisingly easy to date. Give it enough time, and its clean surfaces begin to reveal the period that imagined them. What once seemed to have escaped history becomes one of history's most recognizable styles.
Paco Rabanne's 1966 collection, Twelve Unwearable Dresses in Contemporary Materials, offers a particularly interesting example. A dress from the collection held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art consists of silver and black plastic discs joined with metal rings. Its construction substitutes linked units for the continuous surface we ordinarily expect from fabric. [1]
The title announces a provocation before the wearer even enters the room. Unwearable according to whom? A dress can be recognizable as a dress while refusing the techniques through which dresses have usually been made.
Seen in photographs, the discs suggest an industrial idea of modernity. Repetition becomes the organizing principle. The garment appears assembled, its connections visible rather than hidden inside a seam. Its surface asks us to notice what holds it together.
Yet this supposed break with the past also has a historical resemblance. Discussing a later Rabanne dress from around 1969, the Met identifies an allusion to chain mail within its Space-Age appearance. [2] What looks futuristic can carry an older method inside it.
That overlap makes the archive more interesting than a collection of predictions that either succeeded or failed. Rabanne was not simply guessing what everyone would wear several decades later. His clothes proposed that changing a garment's materials could change what a garment was allowed to be.
There is a bodily complication in that proposal. The Philadelphia museum notes that its 1966 dress was usually worn over a body stocking because the open construction was so revealing. [1] The apparent liberation from conventional fabric still required a negotiation with the person underneath.
I find that detail more revealing than the spectacle of novelty alone. An invention can look complete in an image while remaining dependent on an ordinary solution that the image barely acknowledges. The body continues to need protection, coverage, and a workable relationship with its surroundings.
Viewed from the present, the plastic surface also carries associations different from those it carried in the 1960s. I find it difficult to separate its promise of newness from questions about what happens to a material after our appetite for novelty has moved on. That is a contemporary reading, not a claim about Rabanne's intention.
An archive allows those readings to coexist. The dress can remain an inventive experiment while becoming evidence of the particular future its period wanted to imagine.
The most revealing thing about a futuristic garment may be the confidence with which it turns a material into a promise. Rabanne's linked discs still hold their visual excitement. They also hold a question the future eventually asks of every new object: what remains of its promise once it has become part of the past?
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