When fashion learned to reflect the future.

There occurs a moment at which fashion ceases to act like fashion.

This occurs when the fabric yields to something more rigid. When a dress starts to catch the light in a manner similar to machinery. When the outline no longer appears to be merely following the body, but instead is reconstructing it.

For many decades, whenever fashion has wished to imagine something that goes beyond the present, it has turned to metal.

It has taken the form of armour, chain mail, mesh, plates, jewellery, and sculpture; it has been cut, linked, shaped, polished, and transformed. On occasions, it becomes the structure of a garment; on other occasions, the surface of one; and at times, when light hits it in a certain way, it becomes something completely different: a reflection.

It is here that chrome comes into the story.

The real fascination does not lie in silver garments; it lies in the possibility of changing the body by means of material.

Metal can make the body harder, stronger, bigger, or more architectural.

Chrome is able to make it seem as though it dissolves into its surroundings.
Together, they have given fashion one of its most persistent fantasies:

THE MATERIAL THAT CHANGED THE GARMENT

Metal has never been an obvious option for use in clothing since it is hard when fashion calls for softness, resistant when fabric is expected to move, and industrial when clothing is generally linked with intimacy and touch.

It was exactly those contradictions that made it fascinating.

Metal may be cut, shaped, pierced, polished, and assembled; it can be used to create a structure that projects from the body, or it can be broken down into smaller parts that move with the body. In this way, fashion obtained something more radical than a new kind of decoration: another method of constructing the body.

Paco Rabanne had an extraordinarily clear understanding of this possibility; the micromini dress he designed in 1967 is composed of square and rectangular aluminium plates fastened together with metal rings. The separate parts form an articulated surface which resembles chain mail and, at the same time, is clearly in keeping with the industrial vision of the 1960s.

It is hard to consider such a garment merely as clothing since you can see how it’s constructed and the material is part of what makes it what it is.

Rabanne went beyond simply replacing fabric with aluminium.
He altered the way in which things were made.

In the beginning, he treated industrial materials almost as if they were parts of an object, and instead of sewing the garments, he assembled them. The outcome was somewhere between a dress, a sculpture, and a construction.

WHY METAL?

The appeal of metal is not just visual; the physical characteristics of metal enable designers to do something that conventional textiles are unable to do in a similar manner.

It is capable of producing shape, fullness, resistance, and movement. A plate can support a form. A ring can join together separate parts. A mesh can move over the body. A polished surface can reflect light.

The identical material may therefore give rise to entirely different sensations according to the way it is handled; it can protect the body or make it vulnerable, follow the movements of the body or oppose them, and cause a silhouette to appear delicate, monumental, or almost weightless.

That is the reason why metal became important in the field of fashion.

It enabled designers to stop viewing clothing as merely a thing that covers the body.

Clothing could construct it.

FROM METAL TO CHROME

But there is another reason metallic fashion remains so visually powerful:
The surface.

Chrome does not just mean silver. Chromium is a chemical element, and chrome plating can produce a very polished and reflective surface. In the fields of fashion and design, the term has therefore ended up being used to denote a certain kind of visual style: one that is mirror-like, luminous, and almost liquid.

Metal may be the material of the garment.

Chrome is capable of taking on its own image.

A reflective surface doesn’t just show what is before it; rather, it takes in light, architectural features, colour, movement, and all the surrounding elements. The way it appears is never entirely fixed.

If the surface is that of a piece of clothing, then the body becomes part of the reflection.

THE BODY AS MIRROR

It has traditionally been the role of clothing to form a boundary between the body and its surroundings.

Chrome complicates that boundary.

The person is still present, but the surface starting from them begins to take in the surroundings. When something moves, the reflection changes. If the light changes, then the silhouette changes as well. If the environment is different, the image that results is also different.

The garment becomes very nearly unstable, lying somewhere between being an object and being an image.

Chrome may be futuristic in this way because it doesn’t just mimic technology; it gives the impression of something that is difficult to pin down in one place.

The appearance of a reflective surface, whether cold, luxurious, mechanical, or sensual , depends on the surroundings. It produces a particularly striking contradiction when in contact with skin:

the artificial versus the human.

The body remains soft.

The surface does not.

Nevertheless, they go well with one another.

WHEN THE BODY BECAME ARMOUR

Few designers understood this transformation as well as Thierry Mugler.

Mugler never conceived of the body in a passive way; he enlarged it, compressed it, sharpened it, and transformed it. The body then took on the character of architecture, and architecture, in turn, could become armour.

In all his work, he introduced materials such as rubber, resin, Plexiglas, metal, and reflective surfaces, thus bringing the field of fashion into that of science fiction, machinery, and spectacle.

In the 1990s, this obsession took on one of its most recognizable manifestations in the shape of the futuristic female body being changed into something similar to an android.

Metal and Plexiglas were no longer just used as decorative items. They formed part of the structure of the garment.

The outcome was not a woman in armour.
She was a woman conceived in the form of a machine.

The silhouette was engineered, the surface became reflective, and the body turned out to be something between human and artificial.
At that moment, the future ceased to be merely an abstract concept. It had reached the runway.

THE FUTURE WAS NEVER JUST ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

One could easily explain metallic fashion in terms of futurism.

Silver has a machinery-like appearance, chrome seems technological, and metal reminds one of spacecraft.

Yet the fascination goes even deeper.

Metal can at the same time convey a sense of strength and vulnerability; it can protect the body even though the skin remains exposed, and it may look industrial and luxurious as well as mechanical and sensual.

Depending on how it is constructed, it can recall armour, jewelry, machinery, or science fiction.

It is exactly for that reason that it is so useful in the creation of clothing.

Metal allows the body to occupy contradictory worlds:

human and machine.

soft and hard.

historical and futuristic.

vulnerable and protected.

clothing and sculpture.

The material becomes a way of asking a much larger question:
What might the body turn into?

WHEN TECHNOLOGY CHANGED THE MATERIAL

The fashion industry nowadays does not have to use metal in order to achieve this feeling of transformation.

The technology may be incorporated into the building process itself.

The Skeleton dress by Iris van Herpen is a striking example of this kind of design. It has been made using 3D printing and selective laser sintering, the nylon being used to form a rigid structure around the body, thus creating a skeletal shell.

It doesn’t mimic traditional clothing. It approaches the body in a way that is akin to something digitally engineered.

The material is not the same as Rabanne’s aluminium, the method is not the same, and the technology is not the same.

Yet the impulse is still remarkably similar.
Rabanne changed the material.

Van Herpen alters the way in which it is constructed.

Both ask the same question:

To what extent can fashion depart from the traditional garment?

WHY ARE WE STILL OBSESSED?

Each generation creates its own vision of the future, and fashion has always been one of the places where that future is made visible.

Aluminium is turned into a dress, metal rings form a surface, metal is transformed into mesh, Plexiglas is made into armour, and a reflective finish causes the wearer to become part of the surrounding architecture. Digital fabrication results in the silhouette being made into something almost engineered.

The materials change. The technologies may change. But the desire stays.

Our aim is for clothing to do more than just dress the body.

We want it to change us, to safeguard us, to reveal us, and to make us appear stronger, more unusual, more artificial—perhaps even less familiar to ourselves.

Which is why metal continually comes back.

Here’s why chrome continues to attract us: because beneath the fascination with silver surfaces and futuristic silhouettes lies something much more human—the wish to picture the kind of people we might one day become.

It is not the case that fashion always predicts the future.

At times, it merely gives the future a physical form.

At times, it provides the body with a kind of surface through which we can see ourselves.

By Éther Revue