LOOKING TO THE STARS: ART, FASHION, AND DESIGN IN THE SPACE AGE

What does it mean to look at the sky? Or, perhaps, the better question: What does it mean when we look at the sky? There’s a scene in the Bayeux Tapestry — on view in London for the first time in nearly a thousand years — where men gaze in wonder at Halley’s Comet streaking across the sky. The Latin text reads ISTI MIRANT STELLA: “These men marvel at the star.” For the tapestry’s medieval weavers, the comet’s appearance in 1066 was an omen, the heavens portending that William the Conqueror would triumph in the Battle of Hastings. Some seven centuries later, Caspar David Friedrich looked to the heavens with a different sense of wonder. In Two Men Contemplating the Moon (c. 1825–30), space becomes an unfathomable immensity, an encounter with the sublime. In an unsigned engraving from the 1888 edition of French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s seminal treatise L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire, man goes further, reaching through the veil of sky in an attempt to grasp the mysterious beyond. The gesture seems to prefigure the work of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, father of Spatialism — the human hand piercing the surface of the world to punch out a door to infinity.

Trained as a sculptor, Fontana challenged the illusion of pictorial depth by piercing the canvas, opening its surface to the real space beyond. The dedication of the Hale Telescope in 1948 was among the developments that captured his imagination; at the time, it was the largest optical telescope in the world, capable of peering deeper into the celestial void than ever before. A year later came his first Buchi (Holes, 1949–68), their scattered perforations suggesting that black abyss, like a negative image of the stars. In 1958 Fontana introduced the Tagli (Cuts, 1958–68): precise, knife-cut slits across monochrome canvases. Like Flammarion’s anonymous engraver, Fontana, slicing through the veil of the visible, exposed infinity. “The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite,” Fontana told Italian art critic Carla Lonzi. “Thus I pierce the canvas, which is the basis of all arts, and I have created an infinite dimension, an x which for me is the basis for all Contemporary Art.”

Against the backdrop of the Space Race, the mysterious beyond was becoming increasingly tangible. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, outer space was no longer something just to behold, but an unbounded realm that could be entered. As the United States and Soviet Union competed to explore it, the cosmos became a potent symbol of progress and possibility, its imagery and language permeating visual culture, from art and architecture to fashion, film, and design.

Yves Klein, notably, was galvanized by the idea of boundlessness; to stare into one of his blue monochromes is to feel oneself suspended in the empyrean. His Rocket Pneumatique (1962), meanwhile, was conceived as a spacecraft with no utility and no destination, its sole purpose to drift among the stars forever. Robert Rauschenberg, on the other hand, brought space to earth. His 1962–64 silkscreens incorporated mass-media Space Race imagery into the semiotic clutter of contemporary life. Later, Rauschenberg was invited by NASA to witness the Apollo 11 launch, an experience that inspired his 1969–70 Stoned Moon suite. The hand-pulled lithographs incorporate lunar footprints, technical diagrams, and vegetation near NASA’s launch site.

It is in design, however, that the visual language of the Space Age came into its own. More than a style, Space Age design gave form to the era’s optimism about scientific advancement and the limitless possibilities of the future. Space inspired the signature look of Googie kitsch, à la Coney Island’s Astroland sign and Franciscan Ceramics’s “Starburst” china pattern; it also inspired architectural masterpieces like Oscar Niemeyer’s Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasília. Beyond such overt references to the cosmos, designers embraced new materials and forms that seemed suited to the future: plastics, modularity, and soft, curving geometries. Together, they proposed a world less bound by material and spatial constraints, in which objects — and the lives organized around them — could become increasingly flexible and more widely accessible. This was the age of Eero Aarnio’s Ball Chair and Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK, Massimo and Lella Vignelli’s melamine dinnerware and Hans Hopfer and Mario Bellini’s sectional sofas. Danish designer Verner Panton pushed this futuristic vocabulary toward the psychedelic, bringing kaleidoscopic textiles and high-voltage colors to Space Age interiors. Panton was also an early adopter of industrial materials; his eponymous stackable chair, molded from a single piece of plastic, embodied the era’s enthusiasm for new materials and manufacturing techniques.

As noted in The Graduate (1967), the future, back then, was in “plastics.” Fashion got the memo, too. If Space Age design imagined how people might inhabit the future, fashion imagined who they might become within it, using new materials and geometric silhouettes to recast the body for a utopia of astronauts, new worlds, and endless possibilities. The “mod” look, in its most directional iterations, mimicked plastic’s industrial sheen via cutting-edge materials like polyvinyl chloride (PVC). “A woman today can be anything she wants to be — a Gainsborough or a Reynolds or a Reynolds Wrap,” commented designer Rudi Gernreich, an early PVC devotee. Fellow futurist Mary Quant was “bewitched” by the material, according to the V&A — its high shine and “shrieking colors.” Quant launched her famous PVC-focused “Wet Collection” in April 1963 and was soon followed by French designer André Courrèges, often called the “father of Space Age fashion.” A trained engineer, Courrèges brought math to bear on his clothes. His landmark 1964 “Moon Girl” collection paired PVC with sharply geometric silhouettes. The Courrèges look — astronaut-inspired go-go boots, architectural A-line minis — showed up in pastiche form on the cartoon The Jetsons and prompted Vogue to ask, “Is Courrèges Wearable?” 

Paco Rabanne pushed the futuristic experiment further, following his 1964 collection, “Twelve Experimental Dresses,” with the 1966 “Twelve Unwearable Dresses.” Spoofed in William Klein’s fake-doc Qui êtes-vous, Polly Magoo? (1966), the latter established Rabanne’s trademark use of plastic and metal chainmail. Audrey Hepburn, who could wear anything, wore one of the “Unwearables” in the 1967 film Two for the Road, while costume designer Jacques Fonteray credited Rabanne’s work as an inspiration for his designs for Barbarella (1968). Photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri put his own spin on the galaxy-gallivanting glamazon in his painterly 1967 space odyssey for Valentino haute couture — one of the great fashion campaigns of all time.

In the United States and Western Europe, much of this Space Age optimism took a consumer-focused, utopian form. A future so bright, you had to buy shades — ideally, the Fontana-esque slashed sunglasses designed by Courrèges. But across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Space Age visual culture exuded its own vision of technological progress. The totemic figure was the heroic cosmonaut, while space-inspired design took both consumer and collective forms — a vacuum cleaner shaped like the planet Saturn, for instance, or Bulgaria’s UFO-ish Buzludzha Monument, a former ceremonial hall for the country’s Communist Party. Darker tones emerged in literature and film. Polish writer Stanisław Lem’s 1961 sci-fi masterpiece Solaris, later adapted into Andrei Tarkovsky’s indelible film of the same title, follows astronauts orbiting a distant planet as they try and fail to communicate with an alien intelligence. The novel is ultimately about human blinkeredness; Tarkovsky’s film is a treatise on isolation, its protagonist Kris floating through space with nothing but troubling memories for company. Neither work is cheerful.

Nor, for that matter, is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), arguably the greatest science fiction production of all time. Anticipating our current AI reality — and the dangers thereof — 2001 posits space travel as the natural next step in human evolution. Echoing Flammarion’s anonymous engraver, the film imagines another breach of surface reality, a passage into the transcendental that is at once beautiful and frightening. Across these visions, imagining outer space has always meant imagining ourselves, projecting onto the cosmos our hopes for progress and transformation alongside our fears of isolation and the unknown. Now, amid daily satellite launches, commercial spaceflight, and propositions to colonize Mars, the cosmos can seem almost commonplace. It’s not. Go outside on a clear night and look up. Marvel at the stars.