When you want discussion on fashion, why, sure, this is naturally the first place you think to come…
So last night I watched the premiere of “Star Wars: Rebels” and today I re-watched “Tron: Legacy.” Not a whole lot of similarity of the two, but while watching “Tron” I started to wonder if some of the wacky outfit idea might appear in real life. The thing that linked “Rebels” and “Tron” in this thinking? A whole lot of helmets and gloves.
If Ebola – or the inevitable set of diseases that will follow in the years to come – really catches on, there may well be some serious changes to society. Diseases like the flues are readily transmitted casually, and the fear of these diseases transmits even more so. Plus, we are entering a world of omnipresent surveillance systems, where if you are out in public, you are being watched by the city, county, state, feds and corporations. So is it unreasonable to wonder if the sort of fashions seen in sci-fi might come to pass in reality? But not just cheap plastic masks, but actually functional breathing protection.
In the real world, you start off with cheap surgical masks, the sort of things that have been all the rage in the far East for a while:
The next step up from those are more dedicated dust masks such as:
And then to *good* filter/fume/gas masks:
And then all the way:
These would get the job done, but would be uncomfortable. And stylish? Meh.
But there are alternatives… full head-covering helmets that incorporate air filtration systems. Such as:
And of course THIS.
Of course, one feature that links a lot of these is “poor peripheral vision,” but that can of course be fixed with some tinkering to the designs. And of course not everyone – probably most people – wouldn’t want to dress up like a sci-fi badguy. But the helmet idea does offer a few advantages over simpler masks:
1) Physical protection, like any helmet
2) You could incorporate active sound dampening tech (perhaps not so wise on busy city streets)
3) Cell phones could be incorporated into them. Bonus: with a helmet, other folk around you need not hear your conversation.
4) Google Glass tech would seem to be *easily* incorporatable. You could have full heads up displays and augmented reality projected onto the inner faceplate/eyepieces
5) Voice alteration tech, so you don’t sound like you
6) Built-in air conditioning
7) Pretty much absolute identity protection
8) The faceplate/eyepieces can be made of materials that go from fully transparent to darkly tinted, both for sun protection and for identity protection
9) Built in health monitoring with automatic emergency signaling in the event of illness or injury
If an epidemic breaks out such that this sort of thing becomes fashionable, or at least socially accepted, then wearing regular clothes with the helmet probably won’t fit. If nothing else, regular clothes offer minimal protection against plague; cloth will happily soak up contagions. Here’s where the “Tron: Legacy” fashions come into play. Impractical as hell, at least as made for the movie, but clever redesign should make impermeable outfits like these reasonably practical.
Of course, close-fitting outfits like this, no matter how well engineered, are not exactly going to be flattering for a whole lot of people, but hey, no type of clothes is universal. Plus, incorporating lighting like this could become quite popular. Presumably this lighting could be programmable, with widely varying patterns possible. This would allow people who are otherwise unrecognizable to be quickly recognizable to each other.
Sure, at the end of the day you’d have to recharge you *clothes,* but twenty years ago, who’d’a believed that we’d have to constantly charge up the videophones that we carry in our pockets?
Almost certainly this won’t happen. Ever since at least the 1920’s, the relatively near future was supposed to be populated by people wearing the next best thing to spacesuits. And what’s happened? Airline travel has gone from something you put on a three-piece suit for, to something you show up for in shorts and flipflops. Instead of radiation, bullet and pressure resistant suits made out of titanium and diamond fibers, we’re largely wearing t-shirts and sweats made out of reprocessed *garbage* and stitched together by child slaves in the far East.
Still: cities filled with people dressed not far from Imperial Stormtroopers sound kinda cool.
