VLT Editorial
THE 1960s: SPACE AGE GEOMETRY
A-lines, PVC, and the cold aesthetic of the future.
In 1965, André Courrèges sent models down his runway in white go-go boots, stark geometric minis, and matching white caps. The fashion press didn't know what to do with it. It looked like costumes for a film that hadn't been made yet. It looked like the future.
The Space Age aesthetic was not metaphor. It was sincere. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin had gone into orbit. In 1963 John Kennedy had promised the moon. The culture genuinely believed, for a few years, that the future was going to arrive on schedule and that it would be clean and white and geometric and optimistic. Fashion dressed for that future as seriously as NASA did.
Courrèges, Cardin, Rabanne, these designers were not playing space games. They were proposing a new body in new materials for a new world. PVC, aluminium mesh, plastic, vinyl. The garments in this series are period-accurate reproductions of that moment: the specific confidence of an era that believed it was about to reinvent everything, and almost did.