Think Fashion : vol. 4 — LIFT + DRAG : 'chutes, nylon, and open skies
"not gowns for a bal [sic], but chutes for a fall."
A smattering of articles over the past six months or so contain speculation on how people may want to dress themselves “post-pandemic,” with foregone conclusions drawn from seemingly polar oppositions in the fashion universe. Exhibit A: “we” all succumb to the cocoon-like comforts of inner domestic bliss, and, like a high school wrestling team that never made it past the warmup, cease to wear anything but coordinating sweatsuits (or hell, maybe they’re not even coordinated). Exhibit B: “we” start dressing to such excess, so starved of ritual display and extravagance, that we make Joan Collins’s style from Dynasty appear as if it were the habits donned by Franciscan monks. References have been made to some cyclical return to the “Roaring Twenties” of a hundred years past, a time in which alcohol was prohibited, minorities were barred from voting, and the Second World War remained part of a distant future. Yet the desire for ebullience, for partying, for feeling carefree, wild, and expressionistic — who can resist? Some of the most creative, “carefree” movements in music and dress — jazz, punk, hip-hop, acid house — erupted from society’s margins, reclamation for the dispossessed. Yet when “we” have been collectively sidelined in one myriad way or another, it’s sweatsuits or massive marabou and cabochon jewelry, all the way.
The sentiment is welcome, somewhat. Leisure. Rebirth. Emergence. There was a report on longing for high heels and the efforts put forth in dressing for mingling, for social occasion. During fashion month, there was a desire for optimism and expression. On the runways and in pre-order offerings, some styles appeared (re-)drawn from the look of parachutes, a technology that represents lightness, strength, of quite literally harnessing the elements, of risk, and of safety.
In our world of spandex corsetry, sealed parka outerwear, foam composite footwear, windbreaker sheaths, and microfiber “fleece,” industrial chemistry has enabled the species to sheath itself in fibers synthesized through chemical experimentation. Advances in material science during the mid-twentieth century, from companies such as DuPont, Courtaulds, Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken, and others, brought synthetic fibers from purely experimental phase (or World’s Fair curiosity) to broad commercial availability, to ubiquity in the textiles of today.
Superhero properties such as extreme tensile strength and temperature resistance, elasticity and shape retention, made a twentieth-century society looking for control over its environment a bit more comfortable, a bit more able to shelter from the wiles and whims of nature. Plastics and synthetic fibers offered society a certainty in its answers: authority over large-scale production; a heightened ability to feed, house, heal, and clothe booming populations; further safeguards against incursions of wind, weather, and illness. Society had made for itself a proper armor.
Synthetic materials also seemed to buy time. Sweep them clean, wipe them down, or, as was seemingly popular for a brief period during the 1950s, throw them on the ground. Some lobbying and advertising from—you guessed it—the plastics industry, fixed that issue… Wait.
I had the privilege of viewing a variety of synthetic and natural fibers using microscopy under the glaring fluorescent lights of a small lab housed by the Fashion Institute of Technology. Armed with tweezers and slide mounts, my classmates and I slid painstakingly separated fibers into the viewing port of a microscope. Fibers slid into bright, illuminated view: polyester, acetate, nylon, viscose rayon, silk, cotton, linen, and wool. Under polarized microscopy, we learned, light passes through fibers in characteristic ways, emitting certain colors under cross polarization. Morphological properties may also distinguish a fiber. Unlike silk, with its oblique surfaces, or cotton, with its twists and turns, nylon fibers appear nearly uninterruptedly smooth — cylindrical or trilobal barrels that reveal themselves time and again as consistent, regular forms.
I remember a feeling of slight awe having learned that PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) tape, or Teflon tape, whose uses include sealing pipe threads and conserving Nefrina’s funerary mask at Penn Museum, is temperature rated from -328° F (-200° C) to 500° F (260° C) and retains strength at cryogenic temperatures, having seen success at temperatures approaching absolute zero. Then I remember thinking, if I have ancestors, what the hell would they want with a relic of PTFE, passed down through ten generations of family because it simply will not, seemingly ever, break, down. The Teflon tape ball of 김-Meissenburger, from 8000 years ago, dated c.2014. We tried firing a laser at it, boiling it… but I digress.
Commercialized for hosiery in 1939, after over a decade of experimentation by scientists at DuPont, nylon was advertised as an “easy-living fiber” for its smooth, lightweight properties, similar to silk, yet with elasticity and resilience “as strong as some types of steel wire of the same size.” Parachutes manufactured during WWII were crafted from silk, then nylon, sometimes a blend of the two: an ancient material harvested from bombyx mori woven with a synthetic polymer created years earlier. After wartime material shortages, both fibers were sometimes reclaimed from women’s hosiery. An Office of War Information photograph from August 1942 reads that lengths of textile pictured at the Pioneer Parachute Company were “not gowns for a bal [sic], but chutes for a fall.”
Like many military-issue garments that made their way into daily casual wear, the parachute came, through creative design, to be worn fashionably. It was symbolic, a thing that spoke to utility, swift movement, and levity — a feeling of being carried on air. The ‘chute also provided novel design references in ruching, drawstrings, and ripstop weaves. In perhaps the only example in which a bridal gown textile has seen actual combat, it’s been documented that some individuals, upon return of their partners from WWII, had wedding dresses made from parachutes, some belonging to their soon-to-be husbands, others recovered from the field.
The landing of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, on February 18, 2021, was aided by “supersonic deployment” of a parachute roughly 70.5 feet in diameter, held together by over three million stitches and tested at loads of around 67,000 pounds of drag, well exceeding the force necessary to slow the Perseverance on entry into Mars’s atmosphere. These are environments for which a material that can withstand wind speeds of up to Mach 2 is certifiably justified. Constructed of nylon, Kevlar, and Technora, the parachute was made to deploy in less than a second.
While complex habits of production and consumption transform our understanding of environmental impact — of labor and developing economies — into a spreadsheet of compromises that no one seems to have time to deal with, weighing the consequences of one fiber over another is measured against reactions, however abstract, along the supply chain. “Synthetic” and “natural” fibers shed their easy dichotomies. Water consumption, carbon emissions, land use, and the whole context around a fiber’s creation come into argument. A textile’s physical properties — the way it drapes from the shoulder, the way it grips the thighs — remain. Hermès announced this week that it partnered with MycoWorks on a mushroom leather bag. The material, named Sylvania, is being released as a test, as a small offering of canvas and ‘shroom travel bags. Not quite full-on Birkin, yet an interesting, novel experiment.
There’s also in some sense a relief because the team has been holding the goodness or badness of this in themselves, sort of in the force of their will, and their intellect and their personality, and the test sort of gets to take some of that off their shoulders and says, “Yes, you're right and it is that way...” or, “You’re wrong and it’s not that way.” But it helps shoulder some of the weight of the responsibility
of determining whether the thing you are working on has become all that you wanted it to be.—Adam Steltzner, “JPL parachute guy,” on testing the the Mars Curiosity parachute, 2010.
Forty tons we hang off a Technora thread.
2,000 pounds a piece... 80 lines...
—Doug Adams, JPL parachute guy, 2010.
Some ‘chute styles:
Elsa Schiaparelli Parachute collection, 1936
Parachute wedding dress, Smithsonian, c.1947
Norma Kamali parachute ensemble, 1977
Prada Re-nylon
Goop Emmity dress
Pioneer Parachute Company, 1942
R E A D
Fermenting Culture: An Interview with David Zilber // EMERGENCE MAG Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Vernon Jordan made being a Black man in America look effortless // WASHINGTON POST Robin Givhan
Swallowing Our Bitterness // THE CUT Kathleen Hou
Il Maestro // HARPER’S Martin Scorsese
The Future is Made to Measure // DIE, WORKWEAR! Derek Guy
Andre Walker Has Seen It All, and Still Keeps Looking // GQ Rachel Tashjian
Is Radical Transparency the Future of the Fashion Industry? // WALL STREET JOURNAL Jacob Gallagher
Punk Versus Reagan // JACOBIN Alexander Billet
Rooms of Their Own // NEW YORKER Casey Cep
NEWS
Fashion on screens: London… Milan… Paris…
Cathy Horyn on NY, Milan. Tim Blanks on London. Vanessa Friedman on Paris.
Some happy looks: Hand-painted suit from Connor Ives. Stunning ceremonial palm wine vessels from West Africa. Real panache from Peter Do. Acid house inspo from Palomo Spain. Bespoke ain’t broke from Ashlynn Park. Trash sneakers. Cake face.
Calling all bipeds: pants, slacks, trousers, breeches
Louise Varèse flipped the script on “men’s” fashion in 1915, with some satirical observations on trousers for Rogue. That’s right, Rogue (pun intended). Here, some recent observations on pants: BBC Radio 4 explores when women wore trousers, a ‘hell yeah’ for Issey Miyake Homme Plus pants.
If you want to kick up that bipedalism by running and you’re new to it (running that is, not bipedalism) check out this couch to 5k.
Costume
Eddie Huang’s new film, Boogie, and the lasting appeal of Midnight Cowboy.
SEE
The “Dance Your PhD” prize. Probably the first time “cloud condensation nuclei[9–11]” have made it into hip-hop lyrics. And it is good.
S O N G S
Are you a student? For a complimentary subscription, reply to this email.
Say hello@thinkfashion.news
Twitter feed: @THINK_Fashion_
Tell your friends: