Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ The Future All Over Again

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - September 20, 1999

The Future All Over Again

by Kurt andersen

THE IMPULSE BEHIND MODERNISM was to embody the sensibility of the present moment, not some woozy recapitulation of the past. One of modernism’s offshoots, however, was a kind of set decorator’s futurism, a picturesque sci-fi aesthetic driven by the assumption that if today looks spiffier than yesterday, then tomorrow is sure to look even spiffier. The future was thus designed in detail during the middle third of the century, particularly in the sixties, with NASA space capsules and astronaut suits, the New York World’s Fair, mod Courrèges shifts, “Star Trek,” and—finally, definitively, in 1968—Stanley Kubrick’s “2001.”

Immediately thereafter, with the rise of be-here-now Luddism (health food, macramé, Earth shoes), followed by disillusioned post-hippie dystopianism (the movies “Blade Runner,” “Brazil,” “Mad Max”), any kind of hopeful speculation about the shape of things to come seemed corny and uncool. Instead, fashion designers (and artists and architects) in the nineteen-seventies and eighties were virtually obliged to rediscover and rehabilitate historical styles: long slim skirts and jackets with big, Joan Crawfordish shoulder pads; expressionist and figurative painting; pediments sitting on Corinthian columns and loggias made of stone.

But the pendulum swings. The computer revolution and the endless bull market on Wall Street have made technological optimism respectable and even chic again. As if on schedule, here in the anteroom of the new century we find that we’ve been equipped with the pocket communicators and tiny lasers and big-screen videophones of Tom Swift and Captain Kirk; as far as accessories go, the future is turning out more or less as promised.

Fashion designers, however, don’t seem to be up to the task of reinventing fashion for the new millennium. On the eve of the year 2000, they are returning to nineteen-sixties conceptions of the future: this season, we are being pitched “futuristic” fashion that looks vaguely 1966 because the mid-sixties were the last time the future was conjured in earnest. As we finally stand on the threshold of the future, it’s being marketed as a form of crypto-nostalgia. The future? Been there, done that.

For their final collections of the twentieth century, nearly all of the most ferociously with-it designers at least dabbled in sci-fi a-go-go. Alexander McQueen created shiny circuit-boardpatterned catsuits, and put them on runway models who had been groomed to look like extraterrestrials. Daryl K showed hooded black balaclava tops that turn women into utterly fab nextgeneration commandos. This last round of fashion shows was like “Austin Powers, Part 3,” in which the hero winds up in the twenty-first century, but played straight, without jokes.

It’s not just fashion designers who seem cowed by the challenge of creating evocations of the new century which are actually new. At Disneyland, executives considered various schemes for updating the section of the Magic Kingdom that simulates the future, but they finally gave up; henceforth, Tomorrowland will be presented as a strictly nostalgic view of the future. The futuristic heroes of “Men in Black” dressed and acted like circa-1962 cool guys, and worked in a cool-in-retrospect circa-1962 headquarters.

These “Groundhog Day” games of endless replay are by now a familiar syndrome, a kind of obsessivecompulsive disorder afflicting the whole culture. For the last quartercentury, pretty much every realm of art and entertainment has been trapped in its own self-referential loop. The cultural landscape has begun to seem like some vast M.C. Escher panorama, a slick, airless, and slightly maddening Möbius construction that, no matter how clever, almost never takes us to wholly fresh places, to destinations outside the maze, where things look and smell new. It’s time. ©