2001: A Style Odyssey : ...

The future of fashion is not unisex unitards, helmets and silvery boots. It’s not clothing designed for intergalactic travel or life in a gleaming Utopian metropolis.

In the year 2001, we’ll be dressing for the Information Age, not the Space Age.

Past futurists never imagined that the most visible holdover from the ‘60s outer-space race would be Tang. And they didn’t count on Bill Gates or the Internet.

The computer has completely changed the way we work, live and dress. Think-tankers in the Silicon Valley propelled a dressing-down trend that has taken off throughout the country; “casual Friday” is now commonplace in even the most conservative workplaces. Levi Strauss & Co., among the biggest benefactors of the boom, posted about $1 billion in 1992 sales of its Dockers line of casual wear.

Telecommuting is the next big threat to suits and ties, pantyhose and pumps. In 1991, about 5.5 million U.S. employees worked out of the house, according to Link Resources, a Manhattan-based research firm. In 1995, the number will rise to 11 million, Link predicts, and will continue to grow as the cost of outfitting a home office drops. (The average $2,000 price tag of a personal computer, for example, is expected to decline as competition increases and technology improves.)

Two years ago, when licensed educational psychologist Dr. Bunni Tobias’ office flooded, she held private sessions from her Lake Forest condominium. Her clients, especially the young ones, preferred the comforts of home.

“Everyone loved my living room with its 24 plants and the cats and being able to go into the kitchen for muffins and tea. I found I could also continue writing and producing my materials for teachers and parents from here. My assistant writer and I are about to go on-line.”

Best of all, Tobias found she could do away with the “itchy, scratchy undergarments” and the office suits, which she always found “utterly inappropriate to wear around children. You can crawl around the floor better in stretchy pants. I’m still every bit as neat and tidy--just much more comfortable.”

The change in her work places has meant a decline in overhead as well as deep reduction in her wardrobe budget.

“If you’re able to fax in 80% of your work, then you don’t have to dress every day for the office,” says Richard Martin, curator of the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s a question of formality versus informality.”

Public relations executive Alison Holt-Brummelkamp works at home four days a week to spend more time with her two school-aged children. Not having to dress in skirts and high heels has saved her considerable cash and changed her shopping strategy, she says.

“I’m looking for a lot of comfortable, casual clothing. Now I’ll shop the Limited or Express, where I used to go to Ann Taylor or Nordstrom or other department stores. And I hardly ever buy stockings anymore.”

Witness the proliferation of such stores as the Gap and its recent offshoot, Old Navy, selling relatively inexpensive basics--jeans, khakis, shorts and T-shirts. Only a couple of notches above a robe and slippers, they do just fine for the occasional schlep to the grocery store or coffee shop.

So much for the Flash Gordon vision of ray guns and spaceships perpetuated by the forward-thinkers of the ‘50s.

“(That picture) was so projected on that ‘40s and ‘50s sensibility,” says New York-based designer Todd Oldham. “Ultimately what’s going to happen is that the smartest look in the year 2000 is going to be a pair of khakis and a white shirt. It’s endured for 80 years, so why not another five?”

But computers are destined to do much more for fashion than fuel the dressing-down trend.

Sophisticated computer networking systems will allow people from different cultures and societies to easily trade information, says Dale Gluckman, associate curator of costumes and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As a result, she says, a wide variety of styles and trends will be adopted and adapted. “We’re spreading out in terms of our awareness and contact and understanding.”

At the same time, though, we’re losing diversity.

“When you go to Moscow and they’re wearing jeans, or you go to Beijing and they’re wearing jeans, it’s a pretty boring world,” Gluckman says. “You can go shopping in any city in the country and they have all the same stores.”

The march toward uniformity, Gluckman predicts, could cause a decidedly low-tech backlash.

“It’s still on a very small scale, but there’s a tremendous interest in indigenous production, in cooperatives producing handicrafts, in creating situations in developing countries. I think there will be an upsurge in these cooperatives, in marketing those things globally, and more of that is going to seep into peoples’ consciousness as an alternative, or an enrichment to mass-produced, technologically slick products.”

But don’t expect technology to slow down for a nanosecond. Although cotton and other natural fibers will always be in demand, synthetics will continue to multiply and diversify.

“There was a tremendous interest in the technology of clothing through the ‘60s,” says Martin of the Costume Institute, “with the whole idea of being able to perfect rayon and nylon.”

Polyester, another “miracle” fiber from that era, became more of a national joke than a wonder textile.

“It’s taken 25 years for us to come to grips with it as a body-sensitive material for clothing,” Martin says. “When you look back, you think you can’t believe you would have worn that stuff. It makes me sweat just to look at it.

“But the technology is always improving. If anything, polyester today is all but indistinguishable from cotton and silk.”

And it will continue to evolve as textile companies work on a future generation of fibers that will shield us from the elements.

Technology will continue to influence design as well.

Lynn Felsher, curator of textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology museum in New York, says computers are blurring the boundaries between the creative and business sides of the fashion industry.

“Earlier, designing would have been done by hand by an artist or a stylist,” she says. “Today you can take motifs or images and scan them into the computer, and manipulate those motifs if you want. So you are really eliminating that artist.”

The results, in Felsher’s view, are not always satisfying.

“Maybe it’s changing to a degree now, but there’s something about becoming too dependent on a machine and less on human creativity. I think when you’re totally depending on a machine, there’s a certain amount of rigidity or formality that you don’t get when it’s done by hand.”

It is changing, says Peter Straus, president of AVL Looms in Chico, which supplies software to textile mills, design houses and clothing companies.

Instead of having “techies” interpret designs, he says, artists can draw right on the computer screen with a stylus. That does away with the sometimes cold, manufactured look of some computer-designed graphics.

When completed, a graphic can be printed via an inkjet onto the hard copy used in manufacturing. That step, Straus says, will eventually give way to direct ink-jetting onto the fabric. The technology exists to do it now, he adds, but isn’t readily available.

“When that happens,” he says, “you’ll be designing your own fabric. . . . If a woman wanted her initials put in a repeat pattern on fabric, she could send the design to a small-scale production company and have 10 yards done up.”

Meanwhile, Levi Strauss is already offering custom-made clothes for the masses. Its Personal Pair computer program, now being test-marketed in four of the company’s East Coast stores, offers women jeans that are cut to their figure specifications.

But the computer-generated fashion revolution does not--and will not--agree with everyone.

“Since the ‘60s we’ve had two tracks,” says LACMA’s Gluckman. “One is a high-tech track where we’re using technology and computers to develop synthetics. The flip side has been nature and the past and natural fibers.

“I think there’s a turning away from, or maybe a coexisting with, the high-tech side,” she says, “which tends to be impersonal in many ways, and kind of cold.”