Do you ever google yourself and see what you can come up with? I do, just to see what someone else might find if they were ever to look me up. This time I found something I wrote that I completely forgot about and faded into the vast internet ether until today. It was a learning challenge that several of my friends were a part of, and I decided on week to enter that week’s submission challenge which was to finish the sentence “Deep space astronomy excites me because…”. And this is what I wrote:

Deep space astronomy excites me because while I may be easily excited about many things (many of them quite trivial), space is the furthest and widest expanse of imagination and science I can think of – it is pretty much the only thing that we humans can’t readily explore, and it just so happens that it happens to be infinite. When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut because I found the possibility of a blank slate of stars and night being intermittently spotted with extraterrestrials, planets like our own, and the vastness of infinity wonderfully exciting (Star Wars helped my obsession). As I got older, I started to appreciate all that lay beyond our night sky for a simpler reason – I saw what was going on in our world and wondered that if in some far off galaxy there was another one that had managed to steer away from the very things that create the cyclical downfalls of human civilization. But because I am a Gemini, and I am one of those people who believes in astrology just as much as astronomy, I found the vastness of space too intimidating and focused – I instead settled for a career path in fashion design, where I may wish to design techno space costumes if I wish. Here I am able to practice my imagination through creative design and science through the engineering of clothes and fabric, just on a smaller, less expensive scale.

And the responses:

Thanks for your post. It brings to mind what fashion might be like in deep space – is there a flair to functional? Can one create a designer space suit? What would it look like?

Hmm, my imagination is piqued.

Annching, as a compulsive sew-er & sometimes fashion designer (mostly by accident) myself, I would like to strongly support you to think about working on those techno-space costumes! Who can forget the incredibly sexy little outfits worn by Counsellor Troi in Star Trek TNG? Or by Lt. Uhuru in TOS? OK, maybe forget the TOS stuff. But really; thinking about deep space astronomy as inspiration for fashion … it’s brilliant!

This article on CNN.com dated October of 2008 is actually called “Blending safety with sexy: Space fashion is here”. Yes, they talk about space fashion shows and more fashion-conscious spacesuit design. Space futurism has been overdone as inspiration for fashion (response #2 above). But what about bringing fashion inspiration to practical use (response #1 above)? This is one of the things I explore in my thesis collection Moose and Muse, how the very concept of bringing inspiration to fashion is traditionally what has been done, and what I think is practically begging to be done more and more is bringing fashion to clothing and lifestyle.

Then we could all look good, no matter what we’re doing! That then brings up the issue of what looks ‘good’ and whose taste we are living by. But I think there are more than enough designers in the world to be able to provide the whole gamut of taste level in ways that are useful.