Fashion in Science fiction #1 - "Big badda boom!!!"

Next five posts will be about my favorite fashion in SF media. Much fashion in SF movies is ridiculous...its seems very hard to get it right, particularly with a small budget...however, some is very interesting indeed. Very often the trouble with SF is that they are trying to predict the future of fashion....which is of course impossible.

The smart costume designers go for a retro look so the fashion doesn't date (think of some of the 40's inspired looks in Batman, and the flim noir 30's looks in Blade Runner).

Where costume designers try to predict the future, it normally goes quite wrong. Think of futuristic fashion in some of the Trek movies, Logan's Run, Forbidden Planet.
Futuristic fashion, not suprisingly, always looks like how people at the time would of imagined fashion to look like. This is particularly evident to fashion from 50's era SF, which in trying to predict fashion of the future normally looks very retro to modern eyes.
Any movies from the 80's trying to depict fashion on the future is often flawed because it has to include 80's hair!.

Anyway, one of my favorite futuristic fashion depictions is in the Fifth Element. Also one of my favorite directors (Luc Besson) and one of my favorite designers (Jean Paul Gaultier). Gaultier got a tiny budget to do these costumes, and swore he would never work with such a small budget for a film project ever again.
If you are interested, there's an interview with him on the DVD extras in which he discusses his work, and also some fashion tests shots of Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich's outfits.
He has worked on a couple of movies, including Pedro Almodóvar's Kika, Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's LThe City of Lost Children, as well as Marilyn Mansons and Madonna's stage outfits.
Not too mention his fashion range and his perfume... Gaultier is a very busy man..and my hero!