Science fiction movies set in the near future are always good for a laugh when the setting period arrives IRL. (See this website for some real howlers.) They never get the technological predictions quite right – but, more than that, the clothes people are portrayed as wearing are always incredibly far off.
Probably there is no way to reliably predict future fashions, but this is IMHO and we can guess. What will people be wearing, say, 20 years from now? E.g., will anything else replace the standard men’s business suit with collared shirt and necktie? For casual wear, will anything replace bluejeans and khakis? Will the differences between men’s and women’s clothing and footwear ever diminish?
I’m with ya on this one. Capes are very comfortable. I have a dressy cape (actually more of a cloak) that a seamstress friend made for me, longer than floor length, hooded and made from crushed velvet. It is light weight enough to wear in warm weather but warm and big enough for cool weather that I can wear it and wrap up in it like a blanket. I only wear it for costume events but really would love wearing it all the time.
One of the fun things about having kids is that your 16 year old daughter can wax nostalgic and comment on how she can remember when that was in style. Then you can tell her that you just bought it.
I actually think you may be more right than you think. Gothic Lolita, a trend that has young women dressing up like Victorian school girls, has become more popular with the rise of the internet. I think there will clothing that can be custom ordered for less money and we’ll see more bizarro subcultures.
You already see all but the most formal businesses doing away with ties, I wouldn’t be surprised if they go away completely. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t be surprised if they hang on for a good long while as men’s fashions are slow to change.
I don’t see jeans ever disappearing as we now have more options than before in matters of cut and style. They’ve become a staple. I think they’d only go away if cotton became exceptionally expensive.
Women’s shoes won’t change. We already have the freedom to wear whatever we want. A business woman can get along fine wearing dressy flats and women only wear heels because they want to. However, I’ll bet it’ll become more acceptable for men to wear heels if they want to.
Some of the big changes in fashion came from innovations in materials. Polyester influenced 70’s fashions and Lycra had a huge influence on fashions in the eighties. Maybe there will be some miracle fabric that will change fashions of the future. I could envision a fabric that effortlessly and painlessly clings to skin and would make all sorts of interesting fashions possible.
Lucite was actually really popular this season and designers showed a lot of flowy dresses (more like 60’s frocks than togas tho’) with lucite heels.
If ties go away, I expect the current form of collared dress shirt will be replaced by shirts with a banded or Mandarin collar. An open-necked shirt just won’t do for a boardroom or a courtroom, and having a folded-collar shirt buttoned at the neck with no tie just looks silly.
Although ‘ever’ is pushing it, I do remember how when the Berlin Wall came down, there was a very visible difference between the westerners and those who’d been kept in the isolation of East Germany. The latter were wearing blue jeans, but nothing you’d find in the shops here, either then or now.
Glutton, I actually like it when filmmakers take the high road in interpreting future fashions by not making them radically different from what we have today. One of the great sci-fi films, Aliens, is a good example of this: the “suits” at the beginning of the film donned a coat with a sort of chopped and turned-up Neru styled collar. Other than that, they weren’t much different from the standard shirt/tie/blazer look. Granted, this was probably done to keep the costume department’s budget down, but I prefer to think of it as a creative statement that even in the far future, people will still be wearing [slightly evolved] coats and ties, particularly bureaucratic megacorp executives.
Does anyone suppose that Americans will someday become a little less uptight about wardrobe malfunctions and other semi-nudity? Like, say, at the beach?
…Not too long ago, it would have most frowned upon for a woman to flash her bra. Nowadays, meh.
Aliens was the first one I though of, too. In fact, I don’t think it was even a real mandarin collar- IIRC it was just worn turned up instead of laying flat!
