GLENN O'BRIEN onward RUDI GERNREICH THE IRRESISTIBLE CONCEIT of Austin Powers is nostalgia for futurism.

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GLENN O'BRIEN onward RUDI GERNREICH

THE IRRESISTIBLE CONCEIT of Austin Powers is nostalgia for futurism. That is the endemic condition of the baby boomer We are disappointed at the present's relationship to our past's coming The future was so wide expand We were poised to make science fiction fact. Born forward the New Frontier, we now find ourselves ghettoized by dint of our collective disappointments. We are not the Jetson and not at any time will be. The year 2001 has little chance of living up to the film. And granting we landed on the lunation thirty-two years ago--and still let slip through the fingers a robot on Mars occasionally--we are spacemen marooned forward earth.

The to come still looms large, but it is no longer wondrous and futuristic. Today the futurity as constructed by the various christian religions of Star Trek, Star Wars, and their descendants, is extremely retro The starship is a gussied-up, doodad-clad submarine or aircraft carrier. The United Federation of Planets is still fighting World War II. The limitless futurity as we dreamed it has evaporated into the Gothic dejection of The Matrix, and the triumphal vision of ubertechnology and its brave recently made known culture long ago yielded to the glamorous entropy of Blade Runner

In other words, the hereafter doesn't swing, baby. The disorder of millennia has not been swept away by the agency of science and design. We live in a state of rotating retro samples. The '70 may be come afterwarded by the '60s--or the '80s--but the sweeping leap into the novel has failed. We have lived in consequence of the sexual counterrevolution, the design counterrevolution, and waves of Luddite technoparancia. To find a moderate future we have to pass back to our hydroponic roots

To find an inspiring prophet we hit the archives: Loewy Neutra, Nelson and Fuller For forward psychosexual fantasy we find ourselves screening Barbarella, pat Up, The Tenth Victim, Our Man Flint. If extraterrestrials stumbl across the ruins of today, for what cause would they explain fashion's transition from Courreges, Ungaro, Pucci, and Gernreich to Versace, Lauren, and Hilfiger? Sifting between the walls of the wreckage, they'd suspect disgusting play.

The aliens would no doubt find in Rudi Gernreich--who is the subdue of a retrospective opening in October at the Kunstlerhaus Graz, Austria (see Withers, p 77)--the consummation of innovative, speculative fashion. Did Gernreich threaten the social order for a like reason dramatically that his fashions were politically suppressed? Up to Gernreich, fashion was by the agency of definition progressive and modernist. moreover he stands as the last of the great futurists.

This is not to say that there are no designers transactioned with complex aesthetic and cultural issues. We still have Comme de Garcons, Issey Miyake, and the Belgians, unless their bold deconstructions and appropriations are postmodern ideas that do not deliver the subsequent time but critique the present.

Gernreich designed a subsequent time He worked with a futurist palette of colors. He took direct inspiration from technological progression in a continuously ascending gradations in fabric manufacture. He liberated the carcass with clothing that revealed it rather than concealed it. He naturalized sexuality through literally breaking down the barriers in clothing, with tube dresse and deconstruct bathing suits and the "no-bra bra." He challenged the traditional assignment of parts creating androgynous designs for an androgynous workplace. And he made fashion into revolution from any means necessary--see the topless bathing suit. He foresaw the casual workplace. He envisioned social classes defined by way of taste and ideas rather than by means of an elitist pecking order. And, more than any other designer, he brought a report art sensibility to fashion. He swung baby!

Today we view renewed cross-pollination between the worlds of art and fashion: a inquiry for respect on the part of fashion and power in succession the part of art. unless in Gernreich's pop world, art and fashion were always inseparable ultimate parts of the greater art of living.

In the aged days, when the future was futuristic, when kids dreamed of commuting on jet pack, when everyone was pretty soon to be beautiful, rich, and thanked with fantastic leisure opportunities, when the documentary always conclud with the line "and the dream became a reality," Gernreich realized the dream--with judgments wide open.

The Rudi Gernreich retrospective "Fashion Will advance Out of Fashion" will be upon view at the Kunstlerhaus Graz, Austria, Oct 7-Nov. 26

Glenn O'Brien is a writer who lives in of recent origin York.

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