Engineering fashions fit for the space age

IT was the decade when Parisian tailor-architect Pierre Cardin and engineer Andre Courreges put industrial design onto fashion runways, even topping Audrey Hepburn with a white astronaut-style helmet in How To Steal A Million.

The new, slicker go-gear worn by models was previewed in Queen St, Brisbane in April 1966. Picture: Ray Saunders RS322-9/Courier Mail

IT was the decade when Parisian tailor-architect Pierre Cardin and engineer Andre Courreges put industrial design onto fashion runways, even topping Audrey Hepburn with a white astronaut-style helmet in How To Steal A Million.

In America, NASA’s race to put a man on the moon brought corset designer Playtex into the laboratory to parade astronaut space suits throughout the 1960s.

For a decade, the space race united science and haute couture, putting metal, plastic, rubber and even paper onto fashion runways, and sending delicately hand-stitched synthetics to the moon.

Cardin and Courreges led the runway push to streamlined A-line shifts in bright, block geometric fabrics teamed with flat white boots and plastic helmets. Spanish-born designer Paco Rabanne, also a trained architect, created frocks from plastic and shiny, reflective metallic discs and plates, which he used to decorate Jane Fonda’s green swimsuit in Barbarella in 1968.

“Cardin and French designers led the way in the ’60s,” says collector Diane Pickett, who is showing Cardin and Christian Dior fashions from the decade in a Space Parade on Saturday and Sunday at the Sydney Fair, an antiques and collectables display by 60 Australian dealers at the The Royal Hall of Industries, Moore Park.

“The French couture fashion houses were at the forefront of fashion at the time,” Pickett says. “But watching films from their haute couture parades, you just think, no one is going to wear that.”

A model wears a Pierre Cardin fur-trimmed helmet 1968.

Pierre Cardin A-line 1960s mini skirts

Pickett has imported 10 ’60s space-race designs for the fair, explaining few French couture garments are available in Australia, although in 1947, one year after Dior opened his fashion house in Paris, several Dior outfits were sent to Australia for a Woman’s Weekly fashion parade. In 1948, David Jones department store flew out a 50-piece original couture collection for a dedicated Dior parade by several Dior house models, the first time a complete Dior collection had been shown outside Paris.

In the early 1960s in Paris, Cardin, Courreges and Rabanne sent fashion to the moon long before man had landed. The Soviet Union put a man in space in April 1961, and in May US President John F. Kennedy defined the decade, stating: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

‘Angels in orbit' — a fashion shoot of space age-inspired garments just in time for the moon landing in 1969.

Courreges, who died in 2016 aged 92, began the fashion space race with his 1964 spring “Space Age” collection, introducing short dresses with cutouts, short, A-line skirts, slim pants and astronaut-style goggles and helmets. He teamed clinical white with silver, blocks of primary colours and fluorescent lime or orange. His dresses were teamed with flat white PVC
“go-go boots”, and models’ eyes were hidden behind plastic goggles, to peer out through tiny slits, which Courreges called Eclipse goggles.

In contrast to the tight waists and accentuated busts of 1950s couture design, Courreges explained his styles were designed for comfort, with drop-waist dresses not requiring a bra, which he argued would soon “go the way of whalebone corsets”, functional trousers and short skirts. A New York fashion critic noted that Courreges’ “direct, unencumbered clothes are only for young, fast-moving beauties”.

The new, slicker go-gear worn by models Mignon Haslar, left, 22, of NZ, and Desley Eldridge, 17, of Mt Gravatt, won appreciative applause from a band of way-out boys when it was previewed in Queen St, Brisbane in April 1966. Picture: Ray Saunders RS322-9/Courier Mail

Rabanne followed with metallic vests and mini-dresses, worn by actors including Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot and Elizabeth Taylor. Cardin’s dresses resembled flying saucers or followed Courreges’ minimalist, A-line shapes, with keyhole necklines and bold geometric trims.

Applying construction to fabric, Cardin mixed such fabrics as gabardine with vinyl, creating a “wet-look” plastic cape. He built bras into his 1966 cocktail dresses, which dropped from a cowl neckline to sharp, conical breastplates. In 1967 actor Mia Farrow showed off his above-the-knee sculpted wool accordion-pleat coat.

The efforts of America’s Playtex underwear designers were largely hidden from public eyes until the 1969 moon landing, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11 wearing a spacesuit that author Nicholas de Monchaux explained consisted of “a flight suit, a Goodrich tire, a bra, a girdle and a raincoat.”

Armstrong’s customised, handmade suit, model A7L, serial number 056, with a US flag stitched on the shoulder, was created by International Latex Corporation in Dover, Delaware, the industrial division of Playtex. ILC won a spacesuit contract with NASA in 1962, lost it in 1964 and regained it in a competition in 1965, when the suit from one designer did not fit through the door of the space capsule, while the helmet of the other exploded.

At an estimated cost at the time of $100,000, the suit used 21 layers of synthetics, neoprene rubber and metallised polyester film to protect Armstrong from the airless Moon’s temperature extremes and solar ultraviolet radiation. Blending cutting-edge technology with traditional craftsmanship, each spacesuit was hand-built by seamstresses and required extraordinary precision, with suits rejected for stitching errors of 0.8mm.