A lot of vintage is not comfortable. Either it’s made from uncomfortable fabric, or it’s not cut for comfort. I’m not talking about a fringed jacket, I mean stuff like vintage suits, or puffy rockabilly dresses, or beaver fur coats. And I did not say all fashionable clothing is uncomfortable, anyway.
And anyway, “covers your arms and keeps you reasonably warm in the winter” is not a hard bar to clear - but the standard I was initially responding to was “simple tops, basic pants with pockets, and a comfortable shoe”
This is stuff I’m really not familiar with. Do people actually wear these sorts of things on a day-to-day basis?
“Simple tops, basic pants with pockets, and a comfortable shoe” covers a near-infinite variety of cuts, fabrics, colors and patterns. It’s like saying that a car has to feature four wheels and a windshield. It sounds limiting, but in fact it contains multitudes.
I mean, we do have those asymmetrical haircuts that tend to really short on one side, and longer on the other. The ones that have a full on buzz cut on one part could be argued to be “half head haircuts.”
Rockabilly subculture was all over the place a short while back, so much so that if someone told me they were into “vintage clothing”, that would have been what I assumed they meant. It’s a little bit less so, but Dita Von Teese-esque women still abound. And yes, the adherents tend to wear that as their everyday clothing. It’s somewhat Goth-adjacent, so I know at least 5 people around here like that. In my remote provincial city.
The beaver jacket, I think, would be strongly weather-dependent.
No argument here. BUT there’s a lot of clothing that it doesn’t, either. Once could even say a near-infinite variety of exceptions, even in common clothes, from yoga pants to Hammer pants (neither have pockets) to tailored jackets (not so “simple”) to cowboy boots (not a shoe).
It’s actually been a thing since the 80s, but modern SF is nearly-uniform in depicting a lot of the future as a dingy and dirty grey/brown-clad land lit by neon, or else banal beige Trek adult-onesie-land. So much so that the exceptions really stand out. I blame Blade Runner.
When a movie or series bucks that aesthetic, I stan for it even if it’s otherwise unloved in fandom - like I think the live-action Aeon Flux had a gorgeous aesthetic.
I believe there are a couple of different understandings of “fashion” at issue here – fashion as in what you wear to make a deliberate point of being seen wearing it, even if it’s a PITA to wear it; and fashion in the sense of a trending form/style that dominates how clothing looks once you get past the purely practical application.
Ever get the feeling they are trying too hard to overcompensate to be taken seriously?
I’ve mentioned it before, but I think Back to the Future II had some great future fashion ideas (even if 2015 was a bit too soon) – perhaps the best I’ve seen.
There is a definite ‘look’ with bright colours and patterns, and weirdly different style trends. But there’s a lot of individual variation, far more than today, and the clothing is generally practical as well as stylish.
