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From futuristic designs to unisex fashion
The 1960s were a time of innovation and exploration. While science ventured into space with a series of missions culminating, in 1969, with the Apollo 11 touching ground on the Moon, fashion foresaw a broad cosmic future, experimenting with new technologies and fabrics, and introducing unisex silhouettes.
Predicting women's fashion in the year 2000, the ‘Space Age’ designers Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Rudi Gernreich designed sleek, colour neutral silhouettes in plastic materials, accessorised with vinyl boots, helmets and plastic goggles. Though contemporary history shows that their prediction might not have been that accurate, their creations influenced fashion for the decades ahead.
While the 'Space Age' is considered to start with the launch into space of Sputnik in 1957, the first artificial Earth satellite, the 'fashion Space Age' instead is a trend that originated on the Parisian catwalks in the early-1960s.
During this time, Italian-born fashion designer Pierre Cardin and French André Courrèges, off from their careers in French couture houses, decided to launch their futuristic lines. Alongside them, Paco Rabanne and Rudy Gernreich contributed to the construction of a defined imagery both with their fashion and costume designs, that include the iconic creations for 'Barbarella' (1968) by Rabanne and, later, 'Space: 1999' (1975-1977) by Gernreich.
Inspired by the youthful wave that defined those years, these designers focused on the exploration of the new potentialities of dress, moving away from the past to look forward to a romanticised future.
In 1963, the ‘Cosmocorps’ collection by Pierre Cardin introduced new shapes and geometries, adopting in some cases the same cuts, colours and fabrics for the creations for both men and women. Similarly, since 1961, André Courrèges had infused in his modern collections a sense of gender neutrality, drawing elements from children's clothes.
In addition, their shared characteristic of experimenting with new materials let their creations free of historical gender associations, paving the way to unisex fashion, which would take the fashion world by storm from the following decade.