If we went by a Seventies vision of the future, then we're already living on Mars. Satnav, iPads, robo-vacuums, the seemingly eternal life of former president Jimmy Carter (98 this year!) – all things that, once upon a time, would've blown your grandparents' tiny minds. The future is here, baby, and it's really quite alarming. But for menswear at least, some designers are looking to the past's projections of what was to come. Clever people labelled it retrofuturism, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the most recent suit of noted Cuban collar king Miles Teller.
At the Mexico premiere of Top Gun: Maverick (a film that's not so much retrofuturist as it is just straight up retro), the 35-year-old went for a suit which skewed Seventies and 2077 all at once. It's single-buttoned, but double-breasted, and from Givenchy, a brand that's undergone something of a transformation under the steer of creative director Matthew Williams. It's star command, but Studio 54; it's a doomed colonel from Dune, but from the actually doomed David Lynch version, and it's still sharp enough to swerve costume territory. This is retrofuturism put to good use in good stuff.
Givenchy is not alone in this universe. Just as past ideas of the future switched between flying cars and full-on nuclear devastation, so too do the aesthetics of modern designers. Prada, ever the intellectual, has long been known to dabble in the retrofuturist arts: big clompy space boots, juggernaut-shouldered trench coats and the like. Balenciaga lends from the Nineties, with its insectoid shades plugged into The Matrix. And Walter Van Beirendonck, the Belgian designer that belongs to the elite graduating class of 1981, the Antwerp Six, is full on Fifth Element with kaleidoscopic prints, billowing fits and porcupined shoulders.
Though we've seen such things before in film and literature, they're still pretty mad to look at. Familiar projections of the future can still feel, well, futuristic. iPads less so. But Miles Teller in the suit of Earth's newly-appointed ambassador to Ganymede? The (retro)future is bright.
