What’re You Wearing?

Are we better at predicting what we’ll be wearing 300 years from now than we would’ve been 300 years AGO?

Let’s see: In the early 1700’s it was waistcoats, frilly shirts, breeches and black buckle shoes for the men. And enormous hoop dresses, bustles, cinched waists and ribbons for the women. Where’s the common denominator between then and now? Sexy.

What attracts is what’s sexy back. Although, getting past ten pounds of basket weave and petticoats must’ve been something of a challenge. And am I the only one who wonders how anybody answered nature’s call in some of those getups?

We’ve already seen the dawn of self-tying shoes and step-in grooming machines. Star Wars features desert comfort in white and beige loose-tied wraps. Star TREK, a nice clean military crispness that still requires the open but secret move I always winked at when it got done in almost every TV episode: The Star Trek Tug.

You’ve seen it hundreds of times and it was key in maintaining that near-perfect clothing draping in their uniform jerseys. As someone stood up, be it Captain or hapless security guard who would later be sacrificed in a cave, their hand would go to the waist portion of the jersey and give it a smart tug downwards. Picard did it the most, and the most quietly. Just as he got to a standing position, a quick little tug to smooth himself out, as he was delivering a command line.

I actually had a discussion about this with Garret Wang, who played Harry Kim on Voyager. He and I got to be friends in the voice-over realm right here on Earth, (another story) but he was amused that I’d asked him about that and admitted to doing it several times, himself. Seems that even in the 24th century, we don’t quite have the wrinkle thing worked out. Glad to know there are still challenges ahead.